Meeting the Obligations of the EU INSPIRE Directive - Considerations for Public Sector Organisations

Meeting the Obligations of the EU INSPIRE Directive Considerations for Public Sector Organisations White Paper © 2010 Pitney Bowes Business Insight. All rights reserved White Paper: Meeting INSPIRE Obligations Contents Meeting the Obligations of INSPIRE..........................................................................................3 Introduction ...............................................................................................................................4 Scope .........................................................................................................................................4 Audience and Assumptions .......................................................................................................4 Initial Steps to INSPIRE.............................................................................................................5 Continuing Your Investment in INSPIRE ...................................................................................5 A Note on Spatial Data ..............................................................................................................6 Summary ....................................................................................................................................7 References .................................................................................................................................7 Resources ..................................................................................................................................7 About Pitney Bowes Business Insight ......................................................................................8 © 2010 Pitney Bowes Business Insight. All rights reserved 2 White Paper: Meeting INSPIRE Obligations Meeting the Obligations of INSPIRE This white paper outlines how you can deliver an infrastructure to meet key requirements for the INSPIRE agenda. Pitney Bowes Business Insight (PBBI) is focused on building innovative, and easy to use solutions that can help you meet these obligations. This white paper focuses on the obligations, processes and requirements for INSPIRE and explains how these can be met in order to provide value to organisations and citizens. © 2010 Pitney Bowes Business Insight. All rights reserved. All company and product names, brands, logos and symbols mentioned herein are brand names and/or registered trademarks of their respective owners. © 2010 Pitney Bowes Business Insight. All rights reserved 3 White Paper: Meeting INSPIRE Obligations Introduction “All Government organisations face continual challenges with discovering data, and then enabling efficient and appropriate access to that data. The high level goal of INSPIRE is enabling member states of Europe to make better informed decisions, more insightful planning and more efficient resource deployments by a shared and collaborative approach to intelligence and key decision making. This goal will lead to improved operational excellence and lower overall costs.” Pitney Bowes Business Insight’s aim is to provide those organisations impacted by INSPIRE with the ability to: • Meet the requirements of the EU’s INSPIRE Directive as cost effectively and efficiently as possible • Derive maximum benefit from investments in spatial data infrastructures and metadata • Improve services to citizens • Form closer partnerships with other organisations • Support internal staff in their day-to-day roles The impact of INSPIRE can be described in 4 key concepts These four areas have implications in terms of the systems, processes and workflows around data management in an organisation. 1) Metadata - the publishing of metadata to aid discovery and determination of ‘fit for use’. Metadata also determines the ownership and authority of data, and helps reduce duplication of effort. 2) Service Infrastructure - a range of Open Standard services to connect organisations and disparate systems together. The services fall into 5 main categories [A11.1] a. Discovery - services to find and understand the data b. View - services to visualise data in context c. Download - services to download content d. Transform - service to convert formats and frames of reference e. Invoke - services to combine multiple steps into a single, re-usable process 3) eCommerce - the management of access for services other than discover and view may require appropriate controls, licenses and charging for use. 4) Compliance - the monitoring and reporting of compliance with the directives and throughput on services. Scope This paper will outline: • The key steps to undertake for implementing INSPIRE • Further developments that need consideration • A discussion on spatial data and indirect data references Audience and Assumptions This paper assumes some familiarity with the requirements of INSPIRE, the directives and understanding of the key goals. The following roles can benefit from these topics: • GIS Practitioners and Managers • IT Managers and Data Custodians © 2010 Pitney Bowes Business Insight. All rights reserved 4 White Paper: Meeting INSPIRE Obligations Initial Steps to INSPIRE Preparing for INSPIRE can be quite daunting, there are a range of requirements, standards and deadlines outlined. It is important to ensure resources are in place from the onset in order to ensure compliance is achieved as smoothly as possible. However, there are a number of steps to be taken to prepare for the initial phases of INSPIRE. Step 1 – Undertake a Metadata Audit Survey your data, determine the principle version, and assign a data steward, somebody who is responsible for the data, maintaining the metadata, and providing ownership within the business. If metadata exists, then verify it is current, where it resides and in what format or schema. Step 2 – Metadata Capture Complete an audit of spatial data based on ISO standards and legislation. Use this activity as an opportunity to clean and validate the source data, so you can define its quality criteria and fit for use and purpose. Where possible identify levels of data certification where the appropriate standards can be applied. Step 3 – Share Your Metadata Internally Prior to sharing metadata externally or with partner organisations, it will help to make use of the metadata catalogue for internal business use. This allows validation of data and policy prior to exposing potentially sensitive information externally. This enables testing and verification before key decisions are made based on the data. Organisations can start to derive immediate benefit from the data while improving internal operations and awareness. Step 4 – Start to Undertake a Data Quality Enhancement Process* Once the metadata is published and a catalogue of data is available, now is the time to start developing a data quality strategy. In many cases, the value of data, and therefore the ROI and cleaning that data, can only be determined once a community of users are aware of its presence, and intrinsic value. * Data, even if its level of quality does not meet agreed criteria, should still be audited and metadata captured for it. INSPIRE will require metrics on data maintenance, auditing will provide access to those key metrics. It may not be cost effective to clean the data at the time, but keeping a record of it, its data quality issues, and assigning a nominated custodian, means that the data can be accessed, and if required for a certain purpose, it may be appropriate to develop a business case to address the data quality issues. In some cases errors in data, are worth retention as they can be useful in future data quality processes. Step 5 – Share Your Metadata Externally Consider your metadata to be public domain, be proud to be a custodian of data, and share this information with the public. This is the first stage to being able to share the actual data. You should, where possible, keep records of requests for data from the public so you can determine initial use requirements. Note: It is important to start small, take each step in sequence, and then look to scale over time. Continuing Your Investment in INSPIRE Once Metadata is captured and is being maintained as part of your ongoing business processes, ensuring the greatest value can be gained from your data is the next phase in INSPIRE. This is delivered by providing other external consumers access to your data.