Cambridge companies win INSPIRE contract

07 December 2009, 8:31am

Cambridge 7th Dec 2009 - RSW Geomatics is delighted to announce that, with the 1Spatial Group and Rob Walker Consultancy, it has been awarded a contract by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, Institute for Environment and Sustainability. This contract is to ‘Develop Technical Guidance for the INSPIRE Transformation Service’ – enabling on line access to geographically referenced datasets from different countries and different environmental themes.

The contract requires:
• a survey of ‘state of the art’ transformation services;
• drafting of the associated technical guidance;
• prototyping of a schema transformation service;
• production of a demonstration video in three languages.

The project will last 8 months and will be carried out in Cambridge, UK where all three companies of the winning consortium are based.

INSPIRE is the European Union’s Directive concerned with enabling environmental datasets from all Member States to work easily together for monitoring, policy making, and response to emergencies. Phenomena such as flooding, air quality and marine pollution do not respect political boundaries. It is therefore essential for national and European level organisations to be able to integrate cross border datasets at any time.

Robin Waters, Director of RSW Geomatics, said “We are really proud to have won this contract against strong opposition and we are looking forward to delivering a practical solution to the existing problems of sharing spatial datasets.”

Mike Sanderson, Chief Executive Officer of 1Spatial said “We are already involved in European initiatives, such as ESDIN through eContentplus and in the past we have worked successfully on European Framework Programmes. This contract award is a result of our extensive experience around Spatial Data Infrastructures and our solutions for delivering schema transformation and conformance checking against INSPIRE data specifications. This award also comes at a time when we have just celebrated 40 years in business.”

All three companies have collaborated previously – especially in helping to communicate the importance of the INSPIRE Directive and the positive benefits which it will bring to all users of spatial datasets across Europe.

The consortium also is also co-operating with national mapping agencies from Ireland, Northern Ireland, Finland, Sweden and Norway. Their data will be used as an integral part of the project.

About the contractors

RSW Geomatics Director, Robin Waters, is an experienced project manager and communicator in the field of geographic information. He chairs the Association for Geographic Information’s (AGI) working group on INSPIRE. Recent contracts have included INSPIRE related reviews and promoting ‘best practice’ in the use of geographical information in the public sector.

Dr Rob Walker is the UK’s leading expert on international standards for geographic information, ex chairman of BSi IST36 and leader of the UK delegation to ISO TC211 and CEN TC287. He is the immediate past chair of the Association for Geographic Information and is on the AGI Council and the INSPIRE working group. He coordinated the majority of the AGI comments on INSPIRE Implementing Rules and, with RSW Geomatics, was contracted by the Natural Environment Research Council to report on their readiness for INSPIRE during 2008.

1Spatial is a world leader in object based data modelling with over 20 years experience in the UK and internationally. It is an active participant in the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and has been involved in testbeds since 1998. It has presided over various commissions in EuroSDR and also contributes to several pan European projects, not least with EuroGeographics. Most recently 1Spatial has participated in the testing of INSPIRE data specifications and has developed a ‘Tried and Tested’ schema transformation solution for INSPIRE, which includes quality validation and GML3.2.1 encoding. This has been developed as part of the ESDIN project with national mapping and cadastre agencies throughout Europe, many of whom are Legally Mandated Organisations for INSPIRE.

RSW Geomatics

1Spatial

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