dear all, Today and tomorrow I'm at an INSPIRE/GMES awareness conference in Bucharest organised by ROSA, the Romanian Space Agency.
This afternoon was a good talk by Hugo de Groof, a twenty-year veteran of the Commission's DG Environment group. He talked a bit about the origins of INSPIRE in risk management and in the frustrations of EU agencies in getting data out of national agencies. Re the Directive text, he said that a final draft was circulated by the conciliation committee secretariat [sic] on Friday, and he expects it will be publically released "within the next few days". Metadata search, cf "discovery services", will be free to the public as expected, and so will "view services" but with constraints (likely to be on 'frequently updated data'? and which I regret not asking about the details of. ... How will this work in national interpretation? e.g. the road network data set taken as a whole is frequently updated; but most of it never changes...) What surprised me was this compromise, which I look forward to being able to trace back over the drafts: INSPIRE will only apply to geospatial data sets "when laws or regulations require their collection or dissemination". The example he gave was of a local authority collecting data to support waste management services; if there is no obligation to share the data under existing or future law, it will not be subject to the terms of INSPIRE. Census/cadastral data collected by the same local authority would be subject to INSPIRE's terms. Hugo freely admitted that this was "a weakness in INSPIRE". On the other hand, "all data with reporting obligations in the environment" *cannot* be subject to a charge for use between one public authority and another. Otherwise, charging and licensing restrictions between agencies are permissible as long as they do not present a barrier to sharing data. (Um, but isn't a data license by definition a barrier to sharing data...?) So "the environment" is open, at least between public authorities; but whose environment are we defining? The risk management history of the Directive helps to make sense of why the lists of thematic types in the annexes are so comprehensive. Of course, if you are accurately predicting a flood and want to act on the information model: one needs data about local utility networks; about school attendance to know how many children will be displaced into temporary facilities; about road and rail networks to help manage the impact on local transport infrastructure; about industrial pollutants deposited in the floodplain area; etc etc. In a literal sense, "the environment" is everything that exists... For the annexes: Annex I is coordinate reference systems, grid references, geographic names, addresses, 'cadastral parcel' information, transport, hydro, and protected sites. Annex II is elevation, land cover, "identifiers of properties", ortho imagery and geology. Annex III is everything else - agricultural, land use, industrial use, health stats, environmental monitoring, meterological and oceanographic data - all the real environmental impact, remote sensing data that INSPIRE is designed to be able to carry. Annex III will get 5 years, rather than 2, to conform to whatever metadata standards come out of the INSPIRE implementing rules. Data services and new data sets will have to conform to the interoperability standards within 2 years, legacy data in 7. Tomorrow I'm giving a talk about "An Open Source, Geospatial Web approach to implementing INSPIRE" with an open geodata flip on the end, and am likely to give the general impression that I'm visiting from my regular residence on Mars. Wish me luck, jo PS I'm not gmailing because I'm pretending not to be me, just because I only have port 80 access here... :) _______________________________________________ geo-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/geo-discuss
