INSPIRE: ready for landing?

Prof. Bernardo De Bernardinis

President ISPRA Italian National Institute for Environmental Protection and Research

INSPIRE 2013 Conference – Opening Plenary, 25th June 2013

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Environmental Monitoring

Reporting Integrated Assessment

Urban Planning

Network Services

Information Technology Interoperability

Land Management

Environmental Protection and Research Agencies have to deal daily, often in cooperation with other national and regional Institutions, with geospatial data production, management, and analysis

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• In its initial phase, the INSPIRE Directive was focused on interoperability, information technology, and network services standards

• Now, INSPIRE should further evolve to

maximize its benefits for society, for environmental policy, for reporting obligation, for urban planning, for risk management, for real time information

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But the INSPIRE Directive is still on its way of being implemented in the Member States where often a plethora of public authorities produce and publish geospatial data, not always with a clear co-ordination.

Like in several EU countries, also in Italy we have a rather complex and crowded institutional setting:

Approximately 10,000 public authorities, from central to local administrations

Five National Mapping Authorities, three of which belong to the National Defense System, coordinated by the offices of the Chief of Staff

21 Regions producing official regional maps Civil Protection National Service in charge of forecasting,

assessment and management of risks in real/real time

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Currently, the National Geoportal and Metadata Catalogue are provided by two different Authorities, while the Coordination Structure supporting the National Contact Point is located in the Italian National Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA)

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To improve technical coordination and governance we have a networking mechanism among the Italian Mapping Authorities which include ISPRA, with the participation of the Italian Environment Ministry and of the Italian Digital Agency

Our aim is to define procedures for certification, access

and sharing of cartographic and environmental data and to agree on operational approaches and working methods

This is relevant also for other settings, e.g. Copernicus, EIONET, EuroGeoGraphics, the UN Forum on Global Geospatial Information Management, GEO/GEOSS…

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• The problem is that “by promising interoperability we threw a stone into the sky, which, one day, may fall on someone's head”, as a French colleague underlined recently

• INSPIRE will never work if we do not have a clear goal in mind and stick to it. We should not try to turn INSPIRE into something bigger than it is

• We should try to clear the fog of uncertainty of our complex world through accessible knowledge bases to facilitate the integration of different viewpoints

• If we want to integrate information useful for policy makers and citizens, for emergency and crisis response, for environment assessments, for planning, monitoring and reporting, we need to link information, not only servers

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• In Italy we have now a law that envisages a national platform to give access to all geospatial data acquired through public funds or mixed private and public funds

• It is meant also to support the development of applications and services, based on Earth Observation to protect the environment, to reduce risks and to promote research

• It is quite a revolution! The challenge on which we are now working is to turn it into an operational Decree

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OpenSearch GEO

Some examples of our recent activities

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Land consumption assessment through the integration of remote sensing data with in-situ data for land monitoring

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In-s

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Copernicus HRL

Identification of measures to mitigate hydro-geological instability through agriculture and forest management

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…Finally, thanks to INSPIRE we are getting more “open” with our data...

Thank you!

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