Paper Title (Maximum Two s3

EnvEurope & INSPIRE – use case for collaboration within the EU projects and legislation driven initiatives

T. Kliment1, A. Oggioni2, M. Tuchyňa3, P. Carrara4 J. Peterseil5 1CNR – Institute of marine sciences, Venice, Italy 2CNR –Institute of ecosystem study, Verbania-Pallanza, Italy 3EC, DG JRC, Institute for environment and sustainability, Ispra, Italy 4CNR - Institute for electromagnetic sensing of the environment, Milan, Italy 5Environmental Agency Austria, Vienna, Austria

The EnvEurope project partially aims to create Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) components that are necessary to data exchange among the stakeholders within the sites based network of Long-Term Ecosystem Research in Europe (LTER-Europe)which was recently established (2006) under the auspices of the FP6 Network of Excellence ALTER-Net, building on existing infrastructures and thus a lot of valuable data series. The EnvEurope project is focused on three types of ecosystems (terrestrial, freshwater and marine), and it aims at defining research and monitoring activities relevant to different levels/scales of investigation. One of the six actions, A1 - Data collection and Management, has started with “as-is” analysis of available data/metadata within the domain. To investigate current status, questionnaires related to both data and metadata management have been sent to the stakeholders community. The results from the questionnaires have brought basic information about data management (format, staff), data access (services, users), and data sharing policy as well the expectations from the stakeholders community to the EnvEurope project. Current status shows quite low standardization level in data management; hence the expectations to design the EnvEurope architecture in interoperable (standardized) way are more then necessary. The same situation has appeared also in metadata management. According to the results and related works, projects and programs, system architecture is being designed. The interoperability of system architecture, with Global (GEOSS) and European (INSPIRE) activities, was the first thing considered. Naturally, all expectations from the stakeholder community should be fulfilled as well. According to character of the data involved in project and data themes defined by INSPIRE directive, basic mapping about their possible overlapping was performed and is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1 EnvEurope data mapping to INSPIRE data themes High diversity of ecosystems and of data shows heterogeneity of the information flows within the domain covered by the project. Spatial as well as non-spatial data in many cases are without any schemas and therefore their structure needs to be identified by reverse modeling. When schemas will be identified and developed, harmonization process, will take place to create common specification covering user requirements of community and relevant use cases. Important role play ongoing INSPIRE Annex II+III spatial data themes development process will play important role in shaping of this specification. INSPIRE themes initial scopes, methodology, generic conceptual model as well as rules for encoding are taken into the consideration to achieve high level of consistency and interoperability within and behind the domain covered by the project.

Currently, the project deals with particular metadata (MD) models considering three main resource types within the domain - metadata model for sites, metadata model for datasets within the sites and metadata model for the data access services. Ecological Metadata Language (EML) is considered as a reference metadata model for datasets within the project, because EML is developed as a metadata profile for the description of ecological datasets. The next proposed step is to develop domain specific metadata profile (DSMP) as an extension of reference MD profile (EML). The result of this step is a draft proposal of DSMP based on experiences of the representative stakeholders from three types of ecosystems (Freshwater, Marine and Terrestrial sites). The next step is to perform mapping to ISO metadata standard as well to INSPIRE specific constraints defined by implementing rules. The proposed solution is that all metadata records will be managed within one geocatalogue solution. This solution will have metadata editor with DSMP profile in order to create community metadata as well discovery client for metadata search and portrayal. Third component of geocatalogue solution will provide standardized catalogue service interface for remote clients (INSPIRE geoportal, GEOSS GEOPortal). Selection of the most appropriate models for data management and implementation strategy will create input into the definition of system architecture for the EnvEurope.

Regarding to the current status of the project, we can see many synergies and possibilities for mutual benefits between the activities being performed within the EnvEurope project and INSPIRE. In fact the first would like to actively contribute to the INSPIRE development process via involvement in the Thematic Working Group like Biogeographically regions, habitats and biotopes and species distribution; while the second provides the interoperability framework and can act as gate to the European network of nature conservation related communities. Main focus will be on dataset- metadata and data quality elements proposals for related data specifications. In addition to that active participation in consultation and testing of INSPIRE Annex II+III spatial data specifications is foreseen.

All similar activities, projects (EnvEurope), initiatives (GMES and INSPIRE) should try, where possible, strengthen possibilities for connection, collaboration and sharing best practices, to provide the evidence about their mutual connectivity, justifying their role on the scene. Allowing this connection at least on the high level will bring to all users desired quality and quantity of information and will ensure minimum level of required interoperability.