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HOW TO ENSURE THAT THE TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS
AND STANDARDS ARE BEING FOLLOWED? 

What is the problem?

If the technical requirements of the standards selected for data encoding and sharing are not closely followed, the opportunities to seamlessly combine different datasets, and to ensure an efficient data sharing within a data space, are sub-optimal. In addition, compliance with the provisions of specific legal acts is often based on certain preselected standards, and stakeholders need to verify that their technical implementations satisfy those legal requirements.  

Scenario
Several European public sector data providers are mandated by an environmental EU Directive, and also by corresponding national legislation, to share data on the location of agricultural parcels. Technical guidelines and specifications based on the Directive, which in turn are built on top of international standards, make it possible for the data to be discovered, accessed and used across borders and in different application domains. Following these guidelines and specifications, the data providers develop custom infrastructures to publish the relevant datasets. This is not enough to ensure that the national infrastructures are interoperable with each other, since they are all set up using different software tools and within different environments, and they serve different data (in terms of scope, amount, etc.) 

Proposed Solutions

Combining heterogeneous data sources is only possible through the use of data specifications and approaches that are based on established international standards. The more closely the requirements of the standards are followed, the easier it becomes to combine and use together various data sources in an interoperable manner.  

In addition, ensuring compliance with the technical specifications of data sharing standards as well as legal requirements improves the transparency and trustworthiness between the actors in the data economy. From experience, self-declaration of conformity to requirements and standards is not the optimal approach; automated techniques based on objective and quantifiable information are to be favoured. Validation of resources (data, metadata and services including APIs) is best implemented through the use of specialised validation tools (a valuable open-source example is ETF software) and following an iterative process where different errors are fixed and the tests are rerun until a satisfactory result is obtained. 

Selected resources
  • Minghini, M., Cetl, V., Ziemba, L.W., Tomas, R., Francioli, D., Artasensi, D., Epure, E. and Vinci, F., Establishing a new baseline for monitoring the status of EU Spatial Data Infrastructure, EUR 30513 EN, Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg, 2020, doi:10.2760/296219 (online), JRC122351 
  • Kotsev, A., Minghini, M., Cetl, V., Penninga, F., Robbrecht, J. and Lutz, M., INSPIRE - A Public Sector Contribution to the European Green Deal Data Space, EUR 30832 EN, Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg, 2021, doi:10.2760/8563 (online),10.2760/062896 (print), JRC126319. 
  • ETF validator framework: https://etf-validator.net  

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HOW To's_Technical_TechnicalRequirements.pdf




Recommendations
  • Data providers
    • Incorporate a data validation step in data production and data sharing workflows
    • Develop own or reuse/extend existing Abstract and Executable Test Suites to ensure compliance with legal requirements and standards
    • Ensure the availability of own data validation services/tools
    • Liaise with standardisation bodies and software communities on the topic of data, metadata and service validation 
  • Data users
    • Consider the provision of feedback on used datasets with the aim to improve them 
  • Data intermediaries
    • Offer validation instances and guidelines to other stakeholders
    • Develop certification schemes and labelling/quality stamps 
Disclaimer: The views expressed are purely those of the authors and may not in any circumstances be regarded as stating an official position of the European Commission.

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