To implement INSPIRE, appropriate guidelines are required to enable Member States to set up registries and link them to the central INSPIRE registers.

This study proposes an architecture for an INSPIRE Register Federation based on existing standards and technologies. The proposed architecture makes use of best practice technologies, e.g. as implemented by the UK Government Linked Data Registry or the INSPIRE Registry.

It recommends to implement registers based on linked data standards and suggests different kinds of connection types. A proposed API supports concepts for access, life cycle management, resource filtering, search, query and validation.

Three exchange formats with different levels of expressiveness are proposed based on vocabularies using the Resource Description Framework (RDF): a core vocabulary, a thematic vocabulary and a full vocabulary. Use cases related to code lists have been considered as exemplars and are used throughout the study to illustrate the proposed concepts.