*Full title: A Network to enhance a European Environmental Shared and Interoperable Information System
NESIS is a Network promoted within the ICT-PSP programme, an activity of DG Information Society and Media (DG INFSO) of the European Commission running within the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme (CIP).
It aims to support public authorities in addressing the problems of providing information for monitoring and reporting environmental impacts and threats. By fostering a shared vision for information and reporting systems, NESIS refers to the SEIS (Shared Environmental Information System) initiative of the European Commission and the European Environment Agency, offering an ICT roadmap as an action plan towards a distributed, standardised infrastructure based on shared access rather than centralized reporting.
NESIS is intended to bridge the gap between the ICT domain and the public authorities mandated to create, manage and exchange environmental information. The Network leverages the existing EIONET Community, i.e. some 900 experts from over 300 agencies and other bodies in 38 Countries, with the consolidation of existing good practices and implementing a bi-directional local-global approach.
Policy Context
The Shared Environmental Information System (SEIS) is a collaborative initiative of the European Environment Agency (EEA), JRC (Joint Research Centre), DG Environment, Eurostat to establish together with the Member States an integrated and shared EU-wide environmental information system. The scope to establish such information system is to better share data within Europe and beyond. The system should lead to an improvement in the quality of data and information, in its management, in use and in dissemination. SEIS will be based on a distributed Network of public information providers, to be built incrementally by Member States and at the EU level. The SEIS concept is based on the principles applied also in the INSPIRE Directive for EU spatial information that should be:
- managed as closely as possible to its source
- provided once and shared with others for many purposes
- enabling easy targeted comparisons at the proper scale
- publicly available -also in national language(s)- after proper aggregation and consideration of confidentiality issues
Description of target users and groups
The NESIS Good Practice Catalogue target audience resembles the expected stakeholders of SEIS, that is National and Regional Environmental Agencies, Public Administrations, ICT Companies, Academies, NGOs.
In the long term the Catalogue targets to involve all local and regional environment stakeholders, and as well intends to bridge over to those ones of other sectoral Communities that manage environmental data and are then interested into the SEIS development process, both learning lessons and actively contributing to it.
Description of the way to implement the initiative
NESIS objectives and approach
The NESIS network aims at bridging the gap between the ICT domain and the public authorities mandated to create, manage and exchange environmental information. Its overall expected outcome is to foster the mutual interchange of information between regional, national and international authorities, as opposed to the current one-way flow of information from Member State Authorities to the EU.
In a shared vision for promoting the adoption of an interoperable information infrastructure and for streamlining current information and reporting systems, the NESIS Network originates from and supports the commitment at EU level, to create a Shared Environmental Information System (SEIS).
This general objective implies the actual sharing, in a wide audience of players and stakeholders, of innovative solutions and the need to give a good overview of the status of SEIS implementation in Europe as well as a selection of good practices from which stakeholders can learn.
In this way, the network is aiming to promote the uptake of ICT solutions to address the problems faced by public authorities in providing information related to monitoring and reporting environmental impacts and threats.
Project implementation
The NESIS work was started with the collection of information, according to a twofold approach. On the one hand, a survey was conducted at the national level by the EIONET NFPs partners, in order to get a clear and comparable view of the "State of Play", i.e. how environmental information is presently managed in the different Countries. Totally 12 National State of Play reports have been produced in the initial phase of the project.
In parallel, a collection of Good Practices (for the NESIS Good Practice Catalogue) was started to individuate and characterise those processes that present innovation or other outstanding aspects in environmental information management at any level (European, National and sub-National). All the Network members, as well as external stakeholders, have been invited to contribute to the collection. The reported practices are included in an on-line catalogue available in the NESIS web site, supplying users' search and view options.
The synthesis of the aforesaid states of play at national level together with the analysis of the collected Good Practices constituted the basis for drafting a first version of an addressing document for the SEIS implementation, the so-called ICT Roadmap that is a document proposing specific usage scenarios, corresponding ICT solutions, existing re-usable practices, specific component of SEIS, as well as a possible action table for the SEIS process development.
It was a two-step procedure in which first a draft Roadmap was distributed to the NESIS members for their feedback about the ICT services and technical solutions indicated and requesting a contribution about possible gaps or missing topics, especially the specific ICT aspects for SEIS. After it a broadcast consultation with external stakeholders was done and in this way in such second revision step the document was further improved, also with the addition of some other issues with particular emphasis to the possible use of Linked Data technology and the description of related Good Practices examples.
Finally in the last phase of the project an assessment of potential impacts generated by the proposed solutions for the SEIS ICT Roadmap and Guidelines was carried out, done in the overall project perspective, that is the improvement of the communication flow between MS and EC and among MS themselves.
Success factors
The NESIS Network has started with 16 partners from 14 among EU and Associated Countries, most of them EIONET National Focal Points NFPs, whose participation has been a pre-condition for success, to facilitate the involvement and commitment of the stakeholders in the development and application of SEIS at a National and local level. After it the long term impact is ensured by capacity of involving the audience of local and regional environment stakeholders, as well as those ones from other sectoral Communities.
The SEIS implementation requires to mobilise stakeholders, to share experience and to build consensus around common approaches, preparing plans to trigger, facilitate and widen the uptake of innovative ICT based solutions for environmental information management.
NESIS can strongly support it, including the involvement of local stakeholders, thanks to its capacity of open and operational Network: its partners are in fact able both of establishing links with regional and local stakeholders and of corresponding with the Commission and the European Bodies.
In such a context an important impact derives also from the established collaborative framework for sharing Good Practices on ICT for environmental data management, together with their exploitation to support the SEIS implementation. also throughout the involvement of new Members of the network.
Currently the Network counts 43 Members from 24 Countries
Technology solution
NESIS proposed to choose Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) as the overall set of principles for designing the ICT framework for SEIS.
Technology choice: Standards-based technologyMain results, benefits and impacts
As European-wide thematic network NESIS has achieved important results thanks to the effective collaboration scheme established among the members of the network itself. Here below a short description of the main outcomes is reported:
- The document "Towards the ICT implementation of SEIS", that is intended to be the network position paper offered to the SEIS community as a "handbook" suitable for understanding, commenting, and in perspective implementing, the NESIS proposal for the ICT related aspects of SEIS. The document has to be considered as an -open- contribution to the Community for further discussion towards the SEIS implementation.
- The on-line Best Practice Catalogue, a database offering 44 searchable Good Practices at EU and national level and from 16 Countries and EEA, searchable at http://www.nesis.eu. An abstract inventory of practices is as well available.
- a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis, carried out upon the "Towards the ICT implementation of SEIS" proposal of NESIS. The analysis gives hints about the real conditions of that implementation as expected by the stakeholders, as well as to offer a view of the technical, operational and general societal context in which that implementation would be placed. In this way it completes "downstream" the work carried out by the NESIS network that was started "upstream" with the initial State of Play.
- the project website, as a communication and diffusion tool (http://www.nesis.eu) in view of the NESIS network follow-up.
Together with the above NESIS tangible outcomes, the main benefit of the project is the NESIS Network itself, open to all the interested stakeholders at a national and European level and able to assure the involvement of a larger part of actors operating with the environmental information, ranging from the Central to the Regional and Local Governments, to Private Companies, to Associations and NGOs and to Academy.
As indicated in the NESIS network exploitation plan, produced at the end of the project, the NESIS network will continue - after the end of the EU project- to support the SEIS implementation process at a European and at a National level, in a wide and scattered context of stakeholders. This will be accomplished by sharing the experience and knowledge already acquired during the NESIS project and those ones that will be acquired by further extending the partnership.
The overall impact will be on the Community of SEIS stakeholders: to offer a tool to accompany at the operational level the SEIS design and implementation in the framework that will be decided at a higher strategic level.
Return on investment
Return on investment: Not applicable / Not availableTrack record of sharing
To have established NESIS as a thematic network for SEIS makes easier to set-up the tools to transfer the achieved outcomes and the lessons learnt to a wide audience of stakeholders. At this aim the project development has been accompanied by several dissemination and networking activities, in particular:
- project workshops, most of them organised in the context of INSPIRE, eEnvironmemt and SEIS Conferences.
- national workshops, organised by the EIONET NFPs within their institutional activity
- project website (http://ww.nesis.eu), to supply general information, to allow partners a restricted access to technical documents, and to host the on-line catalogue
- dissemination materials, poster, leaflets, etc.
With the conclusion of the project, the exploitation policies of the NESIS network have been.
In principle and according to the NESIS mission to support the SEIS implementation process at a European and at a National level, the activities carried out aim at keeping aligned the follow-up of the project and its dissemination and exploitation towards a sustainable network with the SEIS implementation process, its operational adoption and address.
The dissemination activities ensure a high transfer potential and trigger the capacity of external stakeholders of getting involved and sharing the project, both in general (that is the process of developing SEIS) and specifically (that is adaptation and replication of good practices to other contexts).
Lessons learnt
- A meaningful number of Good Practices already exist at the different location levels and a high potential for their transfer exist. Those Practices, especially those ones at national and regional level otherwise hardly addressable, are worth to be promoted and a greater effort should be done in that direction, with proper tools and resources. The Members of the NESIS Network can contribute in that direction and are willing to do it.
- The SEIS development process is necessarily very complex and will be highly influenced by technological evolution. Only a structured comitology process can ensure a successful transposition of a -whatever decided- "political" strategy and the implementation of the options suitable to satisfy the needs and the expectations of users on the one hand and the fulfillment of the SEIS provisions on the other hand. The implementation plan of SEIS should care with attention how to activate such comitology.
- Additionally to the traditional ones the environmental stakeholders are getting more and more scattered at the local level and voluntarily provided data have a good potential to contribute, also thanks to technological evolution. This situation should be encouraged and grounding on an INSPIRE-like process an "open" approach would be able to efficaciously match the situation of environmental information, with a positive impact as well on involvement and awareness.