A new report titled “Establishing a new baseline for monitoring the status of EU Spatial Data Infrastructure” was published in December 2020 and is available for download here.

The report describes the process and results of the INSPIRE 2019 Monitoring and Reporting round, providing a snapshot of the status of the INSPIRE Directive implementation across the European Union through 19 performance indicators (introduced by Commission Implementing Decision (EU) 2019/1372), calculated from the metadata harvested from Member States discovery services.

For the first time, the calculation of Monitoring and Reporting indicators happened in a fully automated way using two of the INSPIRE central components: the INSPIRE Geoportal and the INSPIRE Reference Validator, as shown in the workflow below. The process has been recently replicated for the INSPIRE 2020 Monitoring and Reporting, based on the resources published by EU Member States as of December 15, 2020.

In particular, the INSPIRE Reference Validator – whose development has been funded by the ELISE Action of the ISA2 Programme – was used for the first time in the INSPIRE Monitoring and Reporting process to perform an automatic validation, using its API, of all the metadata (both for spatial data sets and spatial data services) collected from Member States public organisations.

The software, which is based on the open source ETF testing framework (which has been also co-funded by ELISE), has been recently included in the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) Toolbox (see this page), thus proving its key role as a fundamental interoperability building block of the European INSPIRE infrastructure.

Get to know more on the INSPIRE Reference Validator and its community in the INSPIRE Reference Validator’s dedicated space.