Proposed INSPIRE Directive

2006-11-28

The European Parliament and Council have reached agreement on the contents of the proposed INSPIRE Directive, which aims to harmonise spatial information across Europe. This is an important step forward which will for the first time put in place a legislative framework for discovery of and access to spatial data resources.

The new Directive will shortly make it incumbent on all Irish agencies that collect and maintain spatial data to also author and publish metadata that describes the content and nature of that data. Ultimately this will make it easier for all agencies to discover, access and consume spatial data.

ESRI ArcGIS desktop users are well positioned to start the compilation of their metadata catalogues. ArcCatalog includes an ISO Wizard that compiles metadata to the ISO 19115 Standard. These metadata can then be published in searchable form directly to ArcIMS Metadata Server.

A number of Irish Agencies including the Marine Institute, Department of Communications Marine and Natural Resources, Geological Survey of Ireland, Department of Environment Heritage and Local Government have already begun this process. These agencies and others including the Environmental Protection Agency and the Coastal Marine Resources Centre have also collaborated with ESRI Ireland on the development of a metadata sharing network known as the Irish Spatial Data Exchange or ISDE (www.isde.ie) which makes it possible to search each of the participating catalogues from a single node.

ESRI Ireland will shortly make an additional hosted node available on the ISDE to which other agencies who wish to publish their metadata can do so without having to purchase their own metadata server.