| NOTAS: | "Directive 2007/2/EC (INSPIRE) entered into force in 2007 with the goal to establish a European Union (EU) Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) to support EU’s environmental policies. The Directive was complemented by a complex legal framework detailing requirements on data provision, which was in turn accompanied by technical guidelines and the establishment of a governance structure involving Member States in the maintenance and evolution of the Directive. After more than 10 years since its inception and at the end of its legally defined roadmap leading to the evaluation by 1 January 2022, INSPIRE has entered a new milestone as the European Commission’s recent focus on the green and digital transformation holds the potential to make it a key tool for the successful (environmental) data sharing in Europe. The objective of this report is twofold. First, we summarise the main developments of the pan-European INSPIRE SDI happened so far from the technical and organisational perspectives, describing the current implementation state of play through multiple dimensions: data availability, governance approaches, available technological stack, influence and role of standardisation bodies and community development. This precedes a critical assessment of what has, and has not, worked well in the development of the infrastructure. Building on such lessons learnt, in the second part of the report we offer a vision for the future evolution of the INSPIRE SDI with a five to ten year horizon in mind. This ambitious vision takes into consideration the current EU policy context as well as the disruptive technological trends bringing new data sources, actors, standards and architectures as new players in the (geospatial) data sharing field. The vision is structured around a set of legal, organisational and technological actions, which are largely extensible to any policy-driven SDI. This makes the lessons learned from INSPIRE also applicable to the broader field of data initiatives. The key conclusion of this report, embedded in the vision, is that in order to remain fit for purpose it is desirable that traditional SDIs evolve from complex and highly specialised frameworks to more sustainable, flexible and agile data ecosystems, lowering the entry level to non-specialists and welcoming an increased participation from less traditional stakeholders (e.g. open source software communities, standardisation bodies and early adopters) in addition to data providers and users. Concretely, at the European level this highlights the need to simplify and modernise the INSPIRE technological framework and to establish a distributed governance structure at multiple levels. It would be hard to imagine a more effective way for INSPIRE to blend within the common European data space envisioned by the recent European Strategy for Data, allowing a seamless and user-centric data exploitation to address an increasing range of societal needs." |
