Bilateral meetings with MIG-T members (upon request)
Draft Minutes
The minutes summarise the main conclusions and actions from the meeting. Actions are indicated in the minutes by using check boxes and are tracked in the "Actions" section below.
The meeting was chaired by the JRC and attended by 54 experts from AT, BE, BG, CY, DE, DK, EE, EL, ES, FI, FR, HR, IT, LU, MT, NL, NO, PL, PT, SI, SK, the European Commission (ENV, JRC, ESTAT), the European Environment Agency (EEA), the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and Fraunhofer IOSB.
Welcome and approval of the agenda
The agenda was approved without additional items.
Actions from the previous meeting (for discussion and agreement)
The minutes of the previous meeting were approved without additional change proposals. All open actions have either been performed, or were explicitly addressed during this meeting.
MIWP Action 1.1. Towards a digital ecosystem for the environment and sustainability
GeoPackage Good Practice (Epsilon Italia)
Status update
Live Demos
OGC API - Records for INSPIRE (OGC)
GeoPackage Good Practice
The GeoPackage repository now includes an examples folder with new content from (1) the GO-PEG project, and (2) the END (Environmental Noise Directive) e-reporting data.
A live demo was provided through the use of QGIS, by uploading, visualising and analysing GeoPackage and GML instances of the same datasets, and clearly showing the higher performances of the former in addition to the ability to modify features.
To create the INSPIRed GPKG instances, both the general (model-agnostic) rules, and the GPKG-specific ones were used.
OGC API - Records for INSPIRE
OGC API - Records is a draft standard, part of the OGC APIs family of standards. It provides a way to browse a collection of records, providing metadata about geospatial resources. There is currently a Core Candidate Standard and the plan is to get the approval from the OGC Architectural Board (OAB) by the end of 2022, and the final endorsement (indicatively) to become an official standard in Q1-Q2 2023.
The standard is publicly developed on GitHub, is based on Spatial Data on the Web Best Practices and is based on OpenAPI specifications. The standard was developed to support JSON encoding.
In OGC Testbed-18, a task (called Secure, Asynchronous Catalogs) aims to develop ISO 19115 support for OGC API - Records.
A joint OGC and ISO/TC 211 code sprint should happen on September 14-16 in London (tbc), covering - among others - OGC API - Records and ISO 19115. Everyone is welcome to join.
MIWP Action 2.2. Priority-driven implementation
MIWP Action 3.1. GreenData4All
Action 2.2. Priority-driven implementation:
An interactive mini-workshop was organised during the 15th MIG meeting using the Mural application with the aim to achieve consensus on how to work towards a more streamlined and feasible implementation of the INSPIRE Directive.
Five priorities and issues where identified: (i) alignment to national priorities; (ii) strengthen compliance towards a commonly agreed set of priority datasets to be harmonised; (iii) improve the indicator framework by also assessing the benefits and use of INSPIRE, (iv) provide master guidance on legal priorities and flexibility in data harmonisation; and (v) define of flexible data specifications. The top actions derived from them are strongly related with the following conclusions: (i) data prioritisation should be user- and usage-driven; (ii) alignment with the Open Data Directive and High Value Datasets (HVDs) is crucial; (iii) there is a huge need for providing practical examples of compliant metadata, data and services.
A report will be delivered after summer defining concrete actions towards a common landing zone. It will be submitted for the approval of the MIG. This report will be also taken as an input for the INSPIRE impact assessment.
Action 3.1. GreenData4All:
The GrenData4All initiative constitutes a key driver of the European Strategy for Data for the revision of the INSPIRE legal framework. Better availability and accessibility to environmental data will help to deliver the EU Green Deal strategies based on the envisaged EU Green Deal Data Space. In this context, there is a need to evaluate the INSPIRE Directive and its coherence with the public access to environmental information Directive (Directive 2003/4/EC), as well as put in practice a politically validated revision of the INSPIRE Directive.
An INSPIRE Evaluation Staff Working Document (SWD) will be published in the coming weeks.
The Call for Evidence for the Impact Assessment for the possible revision of INSPIRE is under preparation and discussion. The different policy options (with different ambition levels) for the revision of the INSPIRE Directive are being assessed, trying to benefit as much as possible the alignment with the recent and emerging horizontal legal framework for digital data (Open Data Directive, Data Governance Act, Data Act), other non-legal initiatives such as the Digital Europe Programme actions, while maximising the consistency with the EU Common Data Spaces ecosystem. The roadmap for the GreenData4All will be adapted to achieve this goal. Indicative timings were provided.
The Amendment of Commission Regulation 1089/2010 has been translated in all official EU languages and now it will be published in the Comitology Register. Once done, after an EU Parliament and Council scrutiny period of approximately 3 months, the text should be adopted by the College.
MIWP Action 2.3.1. Governance of INSPIRE Artefacts
INSPIRE schemas:
Among the change proposals on INSPIRE schemas, some were already endorsed by the MIG-T/MIG and will be included in the next release (only #60 still requires a request for clarification by AT); some others will be discussed in the next meeting of the sub-group, planned for September.
The release v.2022.2 will happen on 31/07 according to the release plan. As usually, versions of the schemas belonging to v.2022.1 will be incorporated in the online schema repository in order not to break existing implementations.
INSPIRE TGs
Among the change proposals on INSPIRE TGs, some were already endorsed by the MIG-T/MIG and will be included in the next release; some others will be discussed in the next meeting of the sub-group, planned for September.
The release v.2022.2 will happen on 31/07 according to the release plan and will include the TG on View Services (converted to AsciiDoc) and the TG on SO. The conversion procedure to AsciiDoc was also improved.
All MIG-T members are invited to check the AsciiDoc TG on View Services and highlight/correct typo or graphical mistakes through pull requests.
The group of expert who volunteered to take the lead of Part B had a third meeting on for both, organising the drafting of the good practice fiche and discussing on remaining issues mainly related to the quality checking of both proposals. Work is ongoing and the final outcomes from the quality checking will be applied to the corresponding consolidated proposals in the next 2 months.
Graphics explaining the simplification approach were presented to the audience.
A draft roadmap was proposed to achieve this goal, presenting the final results in the next MIG-T Meeting on 6th-7th October 2022, scheduling the good practice outreach webinar by mid-October 2022 and submit the good practice for its potential endorsement in the 15th MIG Meeting to be scheduled in November 2022.
A new meeting of the temporary sub-group on data-service link simplification to be organised in September to agree on the necessary changes to the INSPIRE Technical Guidelines to accommodate the good practice and provide the final good practice proposal by the end of that month.
MIWP Action 2.4. Central INSPIRE Infrastructure Components
INSPIRE Geoportal
The progress on the INSPIRE Geoportal revamp was presented to the audience. The developments for providing a new user interface for the revamped Geoportal, linked to the new GeoNetwork backend, is ongoing and should be available by end of September 2022.
The working system for the new GeoNetwork backend has been recently delivered and internally tested by JRC. The contractor (GeoCat) is still working to solve several issues, identified during this first testing round.
The planning for the beta-testing of the revamped INSPIRE Geoportal by MS and EFTA countries, starting on and to be finished by the end of September / beginning of October was presented. INSPIRE Community support for improving the system is more than welcomed during this phase. A first training session (to be recorded) will take place on , a testing survey opened by till end of September, and a second training session organised by end of that month, focused on the survey findings and results. The recording of this first training session will be distributed to MIG-T Members upon request to JRC-INSPIRE-SUPPORT@ec.europa.eu.
A protoype version of the current Geoportal user interface including filtering by HVDs is ready to be launched, waiting for the HVDs Implementing Act to be adopted. The means for filtering HVD within the INSPIRE infrastructure as well as the technical approaches for sharing HVD (through APIs and bulk download) based on the INSPIRE infrastructure are a subject of interest to many MIG-T members. Accordingly, a dedicated slot is to be included in the next 71st MIG-T meeting.
MS and EFTA countries to request for their participation in the beta-testing of the revamped INSPIRE Geoportal by sending an email to JRC-INSPIRE-SUPPORT@ec.europa.eu .
JRC to distribute the recording of the first training session on the revamped INSPIRE Geoportal across the participants in the beta-testing .
JRC to send details to the participants in the beta-testing of the INSPIRE Geoportal backend .
JRC to open the testing survey for the INSPIRE Geoportal backend and share it with the participants .
JRC to include a dedicated slot on HVD in the agenda of the next 71st MIG-T meeting. The emphasis to be put on technical aspects related with the sharing of HVD based on INSPIRE.
INSPIRE Reference Validator and ETF
Version v.2022.2 was released in June 2022 (see the changelog). It includes several bugfixes and new tests, which introduce schema validation against the latest INSPIRE official schemas (in addition to the already available schema validation against the declared schemas).
The ETF v.2.1 Release Candidate was released and is now available for testing. The full release will happen soon, together with a full changelog and updated documentation for admins, developers and users.
The ETF was also proposed for inclusion in the OSGeoLive v.15, to be released in August in correspondence with the FOSS4G 2022 conference.
INSPIRE Registry and Re3gistry
A pre-release of version v2.3.2 was delivered on , including minor bugfixes and new features. A major release (v2.4.0) is expected by September 2022.
Updates on the helpdesk management workflow, and on the release strategy of the Re3gistry software (including related milestones), were summarised.
The update of the INSPIRE Registry to v2.3.1 of the Re3gistry software will take place on . With this milestone, the handover of this INSPIRE Central Component to the contractors of the INSPIRE Operational Support contract will be almost finished.
A brief summary on the community building activities around the Re3gistry software, the Registry Federation tool and the INSPIRE Registry was provided.
GAIA-X for INSPIRE study, Fraunhofer IOSB
A webinar is scheduled on July 14 at 14:00 CET (see the announcement) to present the final results of the study aimed to analyse what are the links and possible benefits for INSPIRE brought by the GAIA-X infrastructure.
Technical topics proposed by MIG-T members
OGC API - Process - File Download Service in Finland, NLS Finland
The OGC API - Processes presented by National Land Survey of Finland (NLS) is a modular and modern OGC Standard following the same architectural pattern and logic as the rest of the OGC APIs. It is powerful for recurring tasks involving regular data downloads. The standard supports, among other functionalities, asynchronous transactions. NLS Finland provided a demo endpoint (ref. the ppt uploaded within the agenda).
The NLS Finland implementation was developed to facilitate the process of selecting and downloading customised subsets of datasets from the national portal.
Instructions on how to request credentials to access the service are available here.
Wrap-up of the plenary part
Next MIG-T meeting (f2f)
Summary of actions
The JRC proposal is is to organise the next MIG-T meeting as a face-to-face event on 6-7 October (see the INSPIRE calendar). The location could be Ispra, Brussels or any other place in Europe, exploiting possible connections with other events taking place in that period.
MIG-T members to suggest possible venues for the 71st MIG-T meeting.
Bilateral meetings with MIG-T members (upon request)
A bilateral meeting was held by the JRC team with DE.