Entered into force in 2007, the Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe (INSPIRE) aims to create a pan-European Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) to support the European Union environmental policies. INSPIRE is the largest effort ever undertaken to create an SDI and is currently seen as a worldwide reference model for similar interoperability initiatives. The infrastructure makes available resources (metadata, data sets and services) from more than 7000 data providers from the 28 EU Member States and the 4 EFTA (European Free Trade Association) countries. The seminar will introduce the INSPIRE legal, organizational and technical framework, describing the role and the current initiatives of the European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC) for the technical coordination of INSPIRE. This will be followed by a practical, hands-on session focused on the search, retrieval, validation and use of INSPIRE data using available web and GIS software applications.

Participants are expected to have basic experience in GIS and to be familiar with geospatial data formats (including XML/GML) and OGC standards. Participants are required to bring their own laptop with the following software installed: a browser, the QGIS desktop GIS software, and a text editor (e.g. Notepad++ for Windows users).

The speaker

Marco Minghini took a PhD at Politecnico di Milano and is currently working as Scientific Project Officer at the European Commission – Joint Research Center. He is a GIS/SDI expert and an open source/open data advocate and user.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/marco-minghini/