Examination and estimation of INSPIRE compliance

Agnieszka Chojka University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn, Olsztyn, Poland

After passing the infrastructure for spatial information law in Poland, that is a transposition of the INSPIRE Directive, then an adjustment of the INSPIRE regulations to national law, the interest of making spatial data and services available has increased significantly, particularly among public administration and private institutions. This entailed a series of initiatives that guaranteed to build so-called ‘thematic geoportals’, dedicated to different subjects and issues, also called thematic nodes of Spatial Information Infrastructure at a regional or a local level. Many companies and institutions supporting implementation of such undertakings have appeared in the market, and moreover assuring that their solutions and products are INSPIRE compliant. But what de facto means ‘INSPIRE compliant’? How to check that this product, solution or that service is INSPIRE compliant?

The capability to examine and estimate of INSPIRE compliance is particularly important from the public administration’s point of view, that spends public money to implement its projects and is scrupulously accounting for by the society. A good example can be here GeoPortal2, a project implementing by the country's Head Office of Geodesy and Cartography in Poland. It is one of the biggest projects in Poland that concentrates on the development of the Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the country. It is designed to improve access to government datasets and provide mapping and survey services to other government agencies, citizens, and businesses. This solution should provide high quality and reliable data and services. GeoPortal2 is supposed to be a central access point to country’s data (INSPIRE broker), specified in the INSPIRE Directive, with the usage of the INSPIRE compliant services, a main access point to country’s Infrastructure for Spatial Information (country broker), as well an innovative tool enabling purchase of products connected with spatial data (business broker). This project is implementing with the support and participation of many different commercial companies and technologies.

The main aim of this paper is to work out and propose a methodics of examination and estimation of INSPIRE compliance, basically in the range of data, metadata and services. The compliance at the legal and technical level will be discussed. The compliance at the legal level (form and substance compliance) means compliance verification with the INSPIRE requirements, guidelines, rules and specifications, with the ISO 19100 series of International Standards in the domain of Geographic Information, with the OGC specifications, with the national law regulations and also taking into account the good practices of similar projects implementation. In turn the compliance at the technical level (technical compliance) means correctness verification of data structures mapping, validity of nilReason values usage, verification of adopted coordinate reference systems, inspection of data structures and formats, control of structure and information range of metadata for data and services. The next step will be making up and building the software tool that will support and automate the process of examination and estimation of INSPIRE compliance.