Development and Use of INSPIRE & NSDI Components:

State of Play at European Level

D. Vandenbroucke1, J. Crompvoets2, K. Janssen3 and C. Bamps1

1K.U.Leuven (SADL), Leuven, Belgium

2K.U.Leuven (Public Management Institute), Leuven, Belgium

3K.U.Leuven (ICRI), Leuven, Belgium

Since SDI emerged in the beginning of the nineties, there has been a requirement to assess and evaluate their status of development as well as their performance. Assesing SDIs is usually done in terms of whether they reach their objectives, i.e. enhancing direct access, instant use and broad sharing of spatial data and services, or by estimating their impact on work processes, organisations or on society as a whole. Also for INSPIRE it was imperative to assess its potential impact at the beginning of the process (Craglia, 2003), to monitor its development once the initiative started in 2002 (Vandenbroucke et al., 2008), and to evaluate the implementation and its impact in practice once the Directive entered into force (European Commission, 2009). Hence, the European Commission initiated in 2002 the INSPIRE State of Play study to monitor the development of the national and (some) sub-national SDI in 32 countries in Europe. The study - which aimed at getting a better insight in ongoing initiatives and activities in the field of spatial data collection and harmonisation, metadata, access services, standards, and organisational and legal issues - was carried out between 2002 and 2008 with the GSDI Cookbook (Nebert, 2004), the position papers of the INSPIRE working groups, and later the INSPIRE Directive as a baseline.

In March 2009, the European Commission launched a new "INSPIRE & NSDI implementation, State of Play" study. The objectives of this renewed study were threefold: 1) To fine-tune the methodology used in previous State of the Play Studies in order to bring it more in line with the development of INSPIRE and the latest work carried out by the INSPIRE drafting teams; 2) To prepare an annual State of Play study for two consecutive years, based on the work done in the previous State of the Play studies; and 3) To carry out an in depth studies on specific aspects regarding the development of INSPIRE to better grasp some key issues on successful implementation and best practice. The methodology to assess the NSDI and INSPIRE implementation was reviewed during a one-day workshop in May 2009. At the same time, the collection of new information began through the analysis of key documents, the screening of geo-portals and the input from SDI experts. A detailed survey took place in spring 2010 regarding the coordination, funding and sharing measures taken by the different countries. From May 2010 onwards, the results from the official monitoring and reporting became available for 25 countries and were included in the European assessement. International experts, representatives from 21 countries and people from the European Commission discussed the first results from this assessment in a workshop in Krakow in June 2010. A final assessment report has been published on the INSPIRE website early 2011.

Several important observations can be made. First, the transposition of the INSPIRE Directive and the organization of the stakeholders have caused many headaches for many countries. Secondly, under the influence of INSPIRE, the major user communities, e.g. Ministries, play a more prominent role in the coordination and implementation of INSPIRE, while mapping agencies are taking often the operational lead. Third, it is striking that most countries are implementing INSPIRE without having a strategic plan or dedicated funding. Another important observation is that although more and more spatial data sets are made available within INSPIRE, many still need to be documented with metadata, and the majority of these metadata still need to be brought in line with the related implementing rules. Fifth, while many European projects are dealing with the harmonization of spatial data sets, this work is only in an initial stage in the majority of them. A sixth observation is that, besides the many viewing services, discovery and download services start really to emerge now, while transformation and invoking services are still unknown territory. Finally, most countries pay more and more attention to interoperability issues and standardization, with many of them having concrete projects to develop and implement those standards.

In the meantime, a second survey took place in spring 2011 on the use and usability of the INSPIRE & NSDI components. First, the degree to which and the way in which the users are involved in the INSPIRE & NSDI development was investigated. Secondly the use of the infrastructure was assessed including the interpretation of the figures from the INSPIRE monitoring and reporting on the use of services for 2010 as compared to 2009. Third, the users and the type of usage was analyzed and finally some typical examples of the use of INSPIRE & NSDI components in specific business processes were analyzed in more detail as well. The paper gives an overview of the status of INSPIRE and NSDI development. It analyses the final results of the assessment of 2010, and highlights some of the remarkable developments in Europe, with particular attention on what seems to work well and why. The paper also discusses the results of the survey on the use and usability. It ends with an overview of the topics which deserve particular attention at the European level in order to obtain a dynamic and well performing European SDI.

Acknowledgement

The INSPIRE & NSDI State of Play study is commissioned by EUROSTAT. The study is carried out by the authors and supported by a group of international experts whom we want to acknowledge for their contribution to the assessment: Ian Masser (retired professor), Mauro Salvemini (EUROGI, Sapienza University of Rome), Angela Ionita (ICIA, Romania), Arnold Bregt (University of Wageningen), Bastiaan van Loenen (T.U. Delft), Marie-Louise Zambon (IGN France), Mark Probert (Geolink Consulting), Pedro Muro-Medrano (University of Zaragoza), Christian Elfers and Kristian Senkler (con terra).

References

Craglia, M., 2003. Contribution to the extended impact assessment of INSPIRE, on http://www.ec-gis.org/inspire/reports/fds_report.pdf.

European Commission, 2009. Commission Decision of 5 June 2009 implementing Directive 2007/2/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council as regards monitoring and reporting.

Nebert, D. D. (Ed.), 2004. Developing Spatial Data Infrastructures: The SDI Cookbook, version 1.0, at http://www.gsdi.org/pubs/cookbook/Default.htm,

Vandenbroucke, D., K. Janssen and J. Van Orshoven, 2008. INSPIRE State of Play: Generic approach to assess NSDI. In Crompvoets, J., A. Rajabifard, B. van Loenen and T. Delgada (Eds.). A Multi-View Framework to Assess National Spatial Data Infrastructures (ISBN: 978-0-7325-1623-9), Melbourne University Press, Australia.