Introduction

The EEA covers thematic areas such as air, water, climate change, biodiversity, land and noise. Our services are made accessible in as many ways as possible. All these map services contain metadata and have a simple interface.

These map-services are available via many other portals such as INSPIRE, ArcGis, GEOS. The EEA allows users to re-link these services into their own websites or portals, but maintains its metadata only from the services hosted in this infrastructure.

EEA standard re-use policy: Unless otherwise indicated, reuse of content on the EEA website for commercial or non-commercial purposes is permitted free of charge, provided that the source is acknowledged.

Our map services can be found at

http://discomap.eea.europa.eu

and under specific topics like

http://water.discomap.eea.europa.eu/arcgis/rest/services

http://air.discomap.eea.europa.eu/arcgis/rest/services

http://bio.discomap.eea.europa.eu/arcgis/rest/services

http://land.discomap.eea.europa.eu/arcgis/rest/services

http://noise.discomap.eea.europa.eu/arcgis/rest/services

http://discomap.eea.europa.eu/ArcGis/rest/services

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Naming convention

A map-service name has three elements of information, separated by the underscore character (_).

• The first part describes the content of the map service.
• The second part relates to cached and dynamic layers.
• A cached layer (also called a tiled layer) has the information already preprocessed and prepared as tiles. These map services have a very high drawing performance but are limited in their use. This type of map service is appropriate for applications that many users will access.
• Dynamic layers are versatile, but they may be limited by available CPU power. The EEA can handle about 50 000 dynamic map requests per hour.
• The third part indicates in what projection the data is physically stored. Although the map services allow dynamic re-projection we do not recommend this kind of request on a high-demand application. EEA natively supports Web Mercator (WM) and Lambert azimuthal equal-area (LAEA). The LAEA map service is recommended for those users wanting re-projection on the fly on a desktop environment.

EEA "Web map" Working environment

If you are an EEA partner and are producing web maps you are entitled to use EEA workspace for web map creation. Ask your project manager in EEA to provide you access tos http:\\eea.maps.arcgis.com

Map services in DiscoMap for developers: example

Services from discomap.eea.europa.eu are allowed to be re-used by anybody. EEA content can be integrated in many different ways by developers or by any end-user who might find an interest in combining EEA's information with there own or other public map-services.

Example: A map service based on Corine Land Cover 2000.

 Map services for desktop applications: example

Map services are mostly used in web applications or are integrated into websites. But they are also increasingly used in desktop applications. Many applications can be used with the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Map Service (WMS) as a source of information. All applications need different URLs to use EEA's map services. The URLs below demonstrate how to add EEA Discomap services into different applications.

 The environmental information published at DiscoMap is aligned with the INSPIRE Directive where possible.

The INSPIRE home page