Abstract
Abstract. The environmental sector in the European Union has taken the lead in an initiative called INSPIRE that aims at creating the framework for the European Spatial Data Infrastructure (ESDI). With INSPIRE it shall be possible to combine spatial data from different sources in the National Spatial Data Infrastructures (NSDI) across the Community in a consistent way and share them between several users and applications. INSPIRE legislation is legally binding on all authorities in the EU member states. From a technical point of view, INSPIRE shall achieve the interoperability of spatial data sets by means of network services. The client of such services shall be enabled to discover, view and download spatial data sets in conformance with harmonised European specifications. INSPIRE promotes conceptual modeling and mandates formal modeling languages such as UML and GML. The domain experts need to find a balance between advanced concepts and traditional but well established patterns, while the proposed solutions should not result in excessive costs for the data providers.
Highlights
This paper describes the current stage in INSPIRE and highlights some of the challenges, with focus on the harmonisation of semantic models
The National Spatial Data Infrastructures got a big boost from INSPIRE
INSPIRE is a big effort by the European Commission and the national governments
Summary
In Europe the users of spatial data benefit from an abundant supply of data sets and services. At the same time they suffer from the variety in data formats and semantic models. For historical and organisational reasons the political division of Europe is superimposed on the offering of spatial data sets. It may not come as a surprise that the environmental sector is among the first groups of users to complain on the lack of cross-border data, as environmental threats do definitely not stop at the borders. Following the statutes of the European Commission, that ESDI shall obey to the principles of subsidiary, i.e. data should be kept where it is and to provide access to it. This paper describes the current stage in INSPIRE and highlights some of the challenges, with focus on the harmonisation of semantic models
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