From the 16th-20th of June, Aalborg (Denmark) will host the annual INSPIRE Conference.
A Reusable INSPIRE Reference Platform (ARE3NA) has been developing a number of activities that will be presented in several sessions at the conference by the ARE3NA team and by experts that have been supporting these tasks, as well as a dedicated workshop looking at the next steps for this Action of the ISA Programme.
Tools for INSPIRE implementation
On the one hand, ARE3NA is helping to develop software and guidelines that support the implementation of the INSPIRE Directive.
For example, a presentation will outline work to develop the software underlying the INSPIRE Registry service, the “Re3gistry”, that will see Version 0.4 released shortly and related developments of the Registry itself.
A study and testbed to look at access control/Authentication, Authorization and Accounting for INSPIRE data and services is also fully underway and a presentation will highlight some of the progress and challenges in this area. A special session has been organised to share experiences from research and the Members States and to provide inputs to a wider discussion on access control and licencing approaches.
ARE3NA also identified OGC Sensor Observation Service (SOS) as a potential INSPIRE download service that aids implementation and the reuse of data. The conference will be an opportunity to present the approach and the work on the demonstrator, open source software and proposed guidelines that are being developed.
Building on and reusing INSPIRE
On the other hand, ARE3NA is aiming to build ‘interoperability bridges’ between INSPIRE and other sectors, including e-government.
A presentation will explore how Geological Surveys across Europe are developing mobile apps and how INSPIRE-like approaches are involved in reaching new users, including citizens, and what reusable tools and approaches are being adopted, providing lessons for other sectors.
Another paper will present some of the steps to be taken in having a common methodology to have INSPIRE in the Resource Description Framework (RDF) that many e-government tools are adopting. In parallel, work has explored how persistent identifiers (PIDs) for location information could be managed and governed, creating valuable pointers for further work.
Last year, work was done on INSPIRE’s Metadata Technical Guidelines, including integrating some good practices and metadata elements for evaluation and reuse. This has contributed to a proposal for the alignment of INSPIRE metadata with the DCAT Application Profile acting as a generic metadata interchange format between European data portals that will be presented at the conference.
Support for wider interoperability
The work in ARE3NA is also contributing to several of the INSPIRE Maintenance and Implementation Work Programme (MIWP) activities, where the work of the Maintenance and Implementation Group (MIG) on conformance testing and validation will also be followed by ARE3NA later this year.
ARE3NA’s Workshop is open to all delegates and will outline some plans to help all stakeholders identify and share details about software supporting INSPIRE implementation and cross-sector reuse. This will include discussing ways of funding new developments and how to identify tools to aid INSPIRE implementation, where the ARE3NA team is looking forward to contributions to the discussion from public administrations, SMEs, open source developers, proprietary software providers, INSPIRE implementers, data users and experts from both INSPIRE and e-government.
More details can be found in the conference website and registered conference delegates can use the Schedule Builder to indicate which session they would like to attend (and a message sent with choices to store them in their personal calendar).
City/Location: Ispra