13th Meeting of the INSPIRE Maintenance and Implementation Expert Group (MIG)
Online meeting 

Day 1: 17/06/2021, starting at 14:00, expected end time 17/06/2021 17:00

Day 2: 18/06/2021, starting at 10:00, expected end time 18/06/2021 12:00

Meeting summary 

Flash report 

The 13th meeting of the INSPIRE Maintenance and Implementation expert Group (MIG) was again an intensive and interactive meeting.

The MIG adopted the meeting agenda and the draft meeting minutes of the 12th meeting of the MIG.

The Commission informed the experts on relevant initiatives and more specifically:

• the “Green Data 4 All” initiative encompassing the evaluation and possible revision of the INSPIRE Directive,
• the roadmap for the amending act to the Interoperability regulation,
• planned reporting data flows to be supported in EEA’s Reportnet 3,
• and the INSPIRE online conference that will take place end October 2021.

Besides a very insightful presentation on the results of the 2020 monitoring and reporting cycle, the colleagues from EEA and JRC provided a full update on the ongoing actions under the new MIWP 2021-2024 (Maintenance and Implementation Work Programme). The Commission is setting up action repositories on GitHub where progress on all MIWP actions can be followed. GitHub will provide richer functionality and flexibility to support interaction with the community.

Several experts suggested to further extend the functionality of the monitoring and reporting dashboard with functionality to filter metadata records on organisation level. The Commission recognized the value of the proposal but does not have the capacity to include this in the implementation roadmap. It was suggested to look into possible collaboration between interested countries to raise the necessary capacity and budget for such extensions.  

Subject to a detailed assessment of its compliance with the INSPIRE legal framework, the MIG has endorsed the good practices on a “OGC compliant INSPIRE coverage data and service implementation” building on the Web Coverage Service Standard and the OGC Coverage Implementation Schema (CIS). Conditional to the adoption of the good practice, the MIG raised attention to the need to further promote the good practice to guarantee a better proliferation amongst and support from different software products. For the moment only one software product has been tested and validated.

Special thanks to the Spanish expert for presenting the outcome of a study on the economic value of the national Spatial Data Infrastructure, spatial data and spatial data services. Many thanks also to DG AGRI and DG ESTAT for the information shared on IACS data sharing and the development of pan-EU data sets, and the Commission/Member State tandem (DG JRC/DE) for organising and debriefing on a workshop with the GAIA-X community. 

MIG experts that want to contribute to the development of pan-EU data sets or want to participate in the GAIA-X discussions are most welcome to express their interest by sending a mail to ENV-INSPIRE@ec.europa.eu with Joeri.Robbrecht@ec.europa.eu in CC.

The way of interacting in the two MIG mini-workshops was appreciated by the MIG experts. Being the MIG’s virgin try-out of the break-out rooms functionality of WebEx, it went rather smoothly. The Commission will further explore and use the concept of mini-MIG workshops in upcoming MIG meetings. On the outcome of the workshops and the next steps, it was agreed that the Commission will document the discussions and conclusions of the break-out sessions and that a small workshop report will be compiled, building on the already distributed workshop background documents. These reports will be drafted and shared with the MIG by mid-July 2021 for review and feedback. The report on “Harmonised vs non-Harmonised” will be used as guiding document for the activities under MIWP action 2.2 on priority-driven implementation and the report on the Future of INSPIRE as input for developing policy options for a possible impact assessment subject to the political validation of revision of the INSPIRE Directive. The Commission will keep the workshop surveys open until end of June 2021 to give MIG experts some extra time to provide input.

All documents and presentations are available on the MIG collaboration platform and the Commission will compile more detailed draft meeting minutes for your review and approval by end of August.

The Commission thanked all MIG experts for their active participation in this online meeting and the colleagues from JRC, EEA, ESTAT and AGRI for the presentations and helping to organise this meeting. A date for the next meeting of the MIG in Brussels was tentatively scheduled for Thursday 25 & Friday 26 November 2021.

Draft Agenda