INSPIRE 2008 Conference papers online

16 July 2008, 1:15pm

The INSPIRE 2008 Conference, titled “Implementation and Beyond,” was held in Maribor, Slovenia, on 23-25 June 2008. The conference, attended by more than 340 participants from over 40 countries, achieved a first in the long series of EC-GI&GIS workshops in that the Plenary Sessions were streamed live to the Internet.

This was also the first of the Workshops to be re-branded with the INSPIRE name, following adoption of this pan-European spatial data infrastructure Directive in May 2007.

Among the more than 100 presentations in two parallel streams and adjacent workshops, the new implementation ‘roadmap’ for the Directive was presented by the Commission, which sets out the dates by which various aspects of the Directive are to be implemented across the themes in the three Annexes. Legally enforceable Implementing Rules (IR) are being prepared by a number of Drafting Teams and Thematic Working Groups. The first IR, for metadata, was accepted by the INSPIRE Regulatory Committee, which is comprised of representatives from all EU Member States, and will be published as an EC Regulation by late summer. Other IRs are still in preparation, with delivery dates noted in the INSPIRE Roadmap and implementation methodology, which are available at the main INSPIRE Web site at: http://inspire.jrc.it/

The EC has also published the presentations and other materials at: http://www.ec-gis.org/Workshops/inspire_2008/presentations.cfm.

All public bodies that produce spatial data – i.e. any data that contains a location attribute – will be required to meet the requirements of the Metadata IR and EU Regulation by 15 May 2010, if their datasets fall under the compliance rules for INSPIRE.

INSPIRE 2008 Conference papers

Geo: International