Requirements and Challenges for Building a European Spatial Information Infrastructure: INSPIRE

The Sixth European Environment Action Programme emphasises the need to base environ-mental policy on sound knowledge and participation, principles that will influence the European Union’s environmental policy decisions for the next decades. In response to this and other high level European Union strategies, the Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe (INSPIRE) initiative was conceived in 2001. Following 3 years of intensive collaboration with Member States experts and stakeholder consultation, the Commission adopted on 23rd July 2004 a proposal for a Directive for establishing an infrastructure for spatial information in Europe (INSPIRE). After the formal approval by the Council and by the European Parliament, the INSPIRE Directive 2007/2/EC entered into force on15th May 2007. INSPIRE will be built on the top of National Spatial Data Infrastructures established and operated by Member States with the purpose to support environmental policies and policies or activities that may have a direct or indirect impact on the environment. This paper describes the background to, the key objectives of, and the current process being established for the development of the technical components of INSPIRE. The challenges in building INSPIRE , many of which can be considered to be “semantic”, will be highlighted in this paper. Also, the link between INSPIRE and international geospatial SDI-related standardisation initiatives will be shortly discussed.

ANNONI Alessandro;  FRIIS-CHRISTENSEN Anders;  LUCCHI Roberto;  LUTZ Michael; 

2008-04-24

CRC Press

JRC38142

9781420070682,   

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