This week has seen a major milestone in the implementation of the INSPIRE Directive, with the INSPIRE Committee unanimously approving the Implementing Rule for the INSPIRE Annex II and III themes [1]. This now means that rules are now in place to help share cross-border and cross-sector spatial data in Europe.
An overview of this major collaborative effort was presented by Michael Lutz from the EC Joint Research Centre at the European Data Forum 2013 in a paper entitled "Data interoperability across sectors and borders - INSPIRE and beyond". Details about the presentation can be found on the conference website: http://2013.data-forum.eu/program.
This presentation also marks the first time our ISA Action, a Reusable INSPIRE Reference Platform (ARE3NA) and its JoinUp community, has been presented to a broader audience, with Michael illustrating the role ARE3NA will be playing in helping to share reusable components related to INSPIRE.
His presentation highlighted four key pillars supporting increased data interoperability for INSPIRE: conceptual data models, encoding, harmonised vocabularies and registers.
Registers were also highlighted as a means to provide unique and persistent identifiers for reference to related resources, as well as supporting their consistent management and versioning. Registers are also an important activity in ARE3NA because the system needed to support access to them and their related codelists, the INSPIRE Registry, is a missing component of INSPIRE that ARE3NA is developing.
As Michael concluded in his presentation, we are happy to announce that the INSPIRE Registry will not only soon be available for people to use in itself but also as an asset for reuse in other sectors, with the software and documentation being provided through our space on JoinUp.
Watch this (virtual) space!
Robin S. Smith
City/Location: Ispra