INSPIRE

INSPIRE is a European based approach at solving interoperability issues for gespatial data.

Introduction (from http://eu-geoportal.jrc.it/)
''INSPIRE (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe) is an initiative launched by the European Commission and developed in collaboration with Member States and accession countries. It aims at making available relevant, harmonized and quality geographic information to support formulation, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of Community policies with a territorial dimension or impact. INSPIRE intends to trigger the creation of a European spatial data infrastructure that delivers to the users integrated spatial information services linked by common standards and protocols.''

''The INSPIRE Geo-Portal is Europe's Internet access point for Spatial Data and Services. From there, you can search for spatial data, services, and organisations. ''

OSGeo's involvement
There is no coordinated effort at involving OSGeo as an organization in the INSPIRE initiative but many OSGeo projects are already tied into processes and the emerging INSPIRE architecture. A formal meeting of OSGeo representatives with people (from JRC) involved in INSPIRE is planned for the end of 2007.

FIT/GAP analysis
How good does Open Source GIS software fit into the INSPIRE picture? Can it be used as a software stack to build INSPIRE SDI's? It would be interesting to make a fit/gap analysis between what the INSPIRE standards require and what the OSGEO stack provides. Also, a plan could be made up to fill in the gaps (in time). The reasoning behind this is that the regular customers will not be able to make this analysis by themselves, so it would be good to have something written up. Ofcourse this is an ongoing effort as not many of the standards are final as yet, and most are still in draft.

Who is interested in collaborating in such a fit/gap analysis?
 * Bart van den Eijnden
 * Dirk Frigne