The European Union INSPIRE geo-portal: Current state of development and lessons learned

The INSPIRE Directive (2007/2/EC of 14 March 2007) lays down the general rules aimed at the establishment of the Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community for the purposes of the Community environmental policies and the policies or activities which may have an impact on the environment. INSPIRE is based on the infrastructures for spatial information established and operated by the 27 Member States of the European Union. Whilst relying on the infrastructures of the Member States, the INSPIRE Directive also requires that “The Commission [omissis] establish and operate an INSPIRE geo-portal at Community level” (Article 15(1)) and “Member States [omissis] provide access to the services referred to in Article 11(1) through the INSPIRE geo-portal referred to in paragraph 1. Member States may also provide to those services through their own access points” (Article 15(2)). The Joint Research Centre of the European Commission is the technical responsible for the setup and operation the INSPIRE geo-portal. In line with the Directive’s requirements, the geo-portal has been opened to the public in November 2011 (http://inspire-geo-portal.ec.europa.eu). This paper describes the characteristics of the current release, allowing users to access spatial and environmental data from many different sources across Europe in one single search. The development of the geo-portal presents a number of challenges linked to the European multilingual context, the diversity and heterogeneity of the existing standards and technical choices adopted across the different Member States. Some of the solutions chosen to overcome those challenges are also presented.

DUSART Jean;  SMITH Robin;  PEREGO Andrea;  QUAGLIA Angelo;  DALLA BENETTA Alessandro;  KANELLOPOULOS Ioannis; 

2013-01-10

JOBSTMedia Präsentation Management Verlag

JRC74691

978-3-9502039-2-3,   

https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC74691,