Confirm and the “Inspire Directive” from the EU

Have you even heard of the “Inspire Directive”?  How, if at all, is it relevant to you?

I have been hearing about it for some while now and asked a colleague to explain what it is and why it might be of interest to Confirm users.

The Inspire Directive will help organisations share data about public assets

It is a European Directive that mandates how people share data, especially data about the Environment that will help where an emergency event happens that requires data to be pulled together at short notice to mount a co-ordinated public response – events like flooding, terrorist attacks, hurricanes and so on.

Confirm users are often the Custodians of such data and the Inspire Directive will either ask them to add fields to their data or ask their colleagues to create “standard data” about their data (aka meta-data).  Additionally, should the need arise, they will need to make their data shareable at short notice via one of the standard methods being mandated within the Directive.

So, this article is here to ask Confirm users: “what has happened within your organisation so far?”  Have you, for example, been asked to enhance your data by a certain date?  Have you been asked to attend meetings about Inspire?  Is there a need for us to discuss Inspire with our Customers now, in the immediate future or at a date set out on the Inspire website: http://inspire.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ 

Would you like to share your thoughts on the matter with me, so that we can align Confirm with your organisation’s Inspire compliance activities?  dominic.mcneillis@pb.com