INSPIRE at the crossroads

Event

This page was archived on 16 Oct 2014 with reason: No more updates will be done

The recent images of flooding across Europe tell a tale of loss of life and livelihood, and the subsequent cost to governments of cleaning up and rebuilding the affected zones. But very often, these stories are presented to us in a national context, when in reality the same phenomena may strike across administrative borders, affecting several regions and even countries. Any emergency effort may also need to cross these borders, relying on international cooperation to do so. This effort, in turn, will rely on information derived from available data and projections from the affected countries.

Vertical listing
What	conference
When	16 Jun 2014 to 20 Jun 2014
Where	Aalborg (North Denmark, Denmark)
Contact Name	Andy Martin
Contact Phone	+45 3336 7162
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The EU INSPIRE Directive was approved in 2007 with precisely this need in mind – to exchange data across local, regional and national borders with a view to better management of the environment, nature, health, defence and transport sectors. As such, INSPIRE aims to provide the structures that will ensure access to the vast quantities of public spatial information available in the Member States.

From 16-20 June, some 500 members of the global spatial data community, consisting of users, technology developers, data providers and policy makers from across the EU, gathered at the 2014 INSPIRE conference, held in Aalborg, Denmark. The theme of this year’s conference was “INSPIRE for Governance” and one of the conference plenaries, titled “INSPIRE at a crossroads”, reflects INSPIRE’s completion of its formative period as it looks to set its mid-term perspective.

The EEA has been a partner in the organisation of the conference and presented an INSPIRE evaluation report and the consultation around it. The EEA also led several workshops and held presentations in support of the INSPIRE implementation. Conference outcomes include an understanding of the strength of the existing community and the start of the new phase in INSPIRE, which calls for more user driven actions that balance the complexity of the issues addressed until now.

Next year’s INSPIRE conference was announced as a joint event with the Geospatial World Forum and will be hosted in Lisbon, Portugal, in May 2015. This enlarges substantially the user community, and provides scope for a preliminary theme on the deeper integration and interlinking of INSPIRE related work with different user and provider communities.

INSPIRE