The minutes summarise the main conclusions and actions from the meeting. Actions are indicated in the minutes using checkboxes and are tracked in the "Open actions" section below.
The meeting was attended by experts from BE, BG, CZ, DE, EE, ES, FI, HR, IE, IS, IT, NL, NO, PL, RS, SI, UK, EEA, ENV and JRC.
Agenda item
Notes / Actions
Welcome and approval of the agenda & previous meeting minutes
JRC/DG ENV/EEA to provide replies to MS comments on the revisions of the IR on ISDSS before/at the MIG meeting in June
2016.4 Theme-specific issues / Thematic Clusters
The new INSPIRE Community Forum (former Thematic Clusters) was launched. It has a different look and feel; there are two new cross-cutting Discussion Groups named Software & Tools and INSPIRE & Environmental Policy.
Facilitators will get familiar with the platform and provide comments/report bugs, then we will informa the community (by the end of May).
The platform is organized around tags, e.g. to make searches and received notifications.
2016.5 Priority data sets
There was a sub-group meeting (12/03/2019) to report the progress in the 4 areas: 1) list of Priority Data Sets; 2) refinement of the methodology to monitor the growth of the Priority Data Sets; 3) report on the progress around implementation; 4) report on CDDA. A Webex meeting of the sub-group is planned before the MIG meeting in June.
2017.1 Master Guidance
DG ENV will inform when there is some news.
2017.2 Alternative Encodings
A webinar was held on May 7, which was very well attended (114 participants from 20+ countries); recording is available on the IKB.
INSPIRE stakeholders are invited to provide feedback/comments on the proposed encodings and implementation examples on Github by end of May.
The alternative encodings will be proposed for endorsement to the MIG in June. The MIG will be also proposed to formally close the Action. Once the alternative encoding will be applied and used the intention is to produce the official INSPIRE Good practice doc(s).
2017.3 Better client support for INSPIRE data
The next step of the work is a meeting with software vendors (including open source projects); the initial idea was to have it in Leuven together with the OGC meeting, but this was not possible so it will be held at the JRC in Ispra. The meeting will be at end of June/beginning of July (dates are not yet decided).
The purpose of the meeting is to present the results of the study (for GML) and the problems encountered, share best practices and discuss what can be done to improve INSPIRE client support.
A talk on this work was submitted and accepted for oral presentation at FOSS4G 2019.
2017.4 Validation & conformity testing
New cloud instances of the ETF Validator were launched, in particular the focus was on the staging instance which includes the new ETS on MD TG v. 2.0, View Services (WMS, WMTS) and Download Services (SOS, WCS). The INSPIRE community was invited to test them.
As a consequence of testing, a number of issues were reported in the GitHub community space: some were fixed, some were positively discussed in a sub-group meeting held on May 22.
ETS on MD TG v. 2.0, WMS and WMTS will be also moved to the production instance at the beginning of June, while SOS and WCS will be kept in the staging instance until more testing is done. Some WCS and SOS experts were further invited to test.
At the beginning of June, the production instance hosted the JRC will be finally dismissed and users will be re-directed to the new cloud production instance.
A talk on the ETF Validator was submitted and accepted for oral presentation at FOSS4G 2019.
2018.1 Monitoring & reporting 2019
The spatial scope code list is now available in the INSPIRE Registry. Eventually new changes have to be proposed using the usual issue tracker.
Discussion on the new monitoring indicators and how to calculate them in practice is ongoing, and will continue at the MIG meeting in June.
The country fiche editor has been well received and used: all countries except FR and IT have provided updates. A discussion on how to provide translations will be held.
DG ENV explains that 2019 is a transition year; the Commission will provide feedback/assessment on the country fiche in 2020.
2019.2 Improving availability of INSPIRE data
JRC requested MS to provide instructions on how to identify open data in their national catalogs (where open data means data available under licenses allowing reuse for any purpose, under - at most - the condition to attribute the source). MS should start from the information already provided two years ago for a similar study and confirm or revise it. Deadline is June 7.
About the use of authentication layers and the organization of data for publishing/distribution, JRC is planning to launch a call for editors to compile a list of good practices.
Regarding the simplification of data-service linking, JRC has requested 11 MS (those which expressed interest in contributing to the work) to provide examples of MD records and to describe their future plans on how this simplified option will be deployed (e.g. by changing all the MD records, or only the new ones, etc.). Deadline is the end of May. A teleconference with MS will then be held before the MIG meeting, where JRC will report on this work.
Register and registries
JRC completed the development of the backend of the new Re3gistry software v. 2.0, which is currently under security testing. Once completed, it will be made available for testing.
Colleagues from Finland are still developing the frontend. The work will be completed by the summer.
The mechanism for software governance seems to work fine.
Geoportal
The new harvesting console has been heavily used over the last months (only few countries have not yet used it).
The helpdesk is receiving many questions about the harvesting and the sandbox. Since many errors people get would be easily detected by the Reference Validator, JRC will try to direct people to the Validator before opening issues in the Geoportal helpdesk.
The frontend and backend of the Geoportal were updated with some new functonality:
English translation for title and abstract (effective after the next harvesting). If the English translation was provided by the MS, this translation is used, otherwise the translation is the one from the Commission Translation Service.
filtering of data sets by the complete European scale, when selecting a theme. This is an effort towards building pan-European data sets.
The linkage checker tool is ready, and currently undergoing the security checks at the JRC. The release is planned for next week. The tool has 2 modes:
the user enters the metadata of the dataset and services that have not yet been harvested, and the check will tell if the links are correctly established;
the user has already harvested the resources in the Geoportal, but for any reason the links are not established and the services are not visible in the Geoportal.
SDW Action 3 (WFS 3.0)
No follow-up from last the last meeting.
WFS 3.0 may have a new name (OGC API).
DK is looking at the mapping right now, some feedback may come before the OGC hackathon.
All to have a look at the mapping document and provide feedback.
We need to move towards drafting a good practice document, where we focus on how to practically use WFS 3.0 to deliver INSPIRE data. It is agreed to put together a first document, before collecting feedback (before implementations).
SDW Action 4 (making spatial data discoverable through mainstream search engines)
A 1.5 day workshop is organized on July 3-4 at the JRC in Ispra (see here). A call for abstracts was launched to get proposals from people who have solutions already in place or ideas to be discussed.
We got around 20 submissions, of which only 1 was rejected. Many participants (in addition to the speakers) are expected.
The program will be heterogeneous and will also include discussions in breakout groups.
JRC to share the final agenda, when ready.
SDW Action 5 (linking spatial data and persistent ids)
It is a draft specification developed by the WG of W3C dealing with profiles for data and metadata, allowing to have a standardized way to query a service or an API to get back data or metadata conformal to a given application profile/schema (such as GML). This is already supported by a number of services and APIs, but not in an interoperable way.
The specification defines additional HTTP headers to specify profiles and standard query string arguments.
There is currently an open call for comments, available online; comments can be posted on the ML of this W3C WG.
The same W3C WG also revised the DCAT specification, which has started the process to be endorsed as a recommendation.
The revised version of DCAT takes into account implementations and metadata profiles following the release of the first version of DCAT in 2014. Notably, many of the revisions stem from work done at the EU level of DCAT-AP, GeoDCAT-AP and StatDCAT-AP, and related implementations.
The previous version of the specification was extended in a number of aspects related to geospatial data, re-using approaches defined in GeoDCAT-AP. In articular:
Inclusion of services / APIs as resources that can be described in a catalogue
Possibility to specify coordinate reference systems, spatial and temporal resolution
Definition of specific properties for specifying spatial coverage as bounding boxes, centroids, and arbitrary geometries
AOB / Information points
MIG meeting
It will be only a 1-day meeting, since a workshop on the future of INSPIRE will be held on the second day.
A draft agenda is ready, which has the usual structure.
ISA2 and ELISE activities can be also shared with the MIG for information.
"Future of INSPIRE" workshop
It will take place on the day after the MIG meeting to discuss what will happen to INSPIRE after 2020.
INSPIRE Helsinki 2019
JRC and the Local Organizing Team are in constant contact.
The event will be small (max. 150 people) and organized around challenges; the website is already available.
The call for challenges has just closed: there were 8 proposals submitted, including one from the JRC on improving INSPIRE usability. Accepted challenges will be published online at the beginning of June and teams will be able to register.
The call for workshops is open, with deadline on June 3.
During the same week other events are taking place in Helsinki (SEMIC Conference and RDA Plenary), so it's a good idea to start pre-booking hotels.
INSPIRE Conference Dubrovnik 2020
There has been a meeting (JRC, DG ENV and LOC) at the beginning of May with a visit to the conference location; next week there will be a first web page ("Save the date").
The conference title goes in the direction of digitalisation and sustainability.
Keynotes will concentrated in one day (first day), on the other days there will be parallel sessions and workshops.
Provision of a valid MD TG v. 2.0 record
After a request to provide a valid MD v. 2.0 record on this page of the IKB, the JRC has developed a sample MD record for datasets, accessible here and currently under finalization by the sub-group 2017.4. A MD record for services will be also provided.
Another version including additional recommendations (e.g. additional keywords) will be provided in the future.
Next meeting: Thursday, 27 June 2019, 10:00-11:30 CEST
