The European INSPIRE Directive

ISO/TC211 standards used

19101 Geographic information — Reference model
19103 Geographic information — Conceptual schema language
19106 Geographic information — Profiles
19107 Geographic information — Spatial schema
19108 Geographic information — Temporal schema
19109 Geographic information — Rules for application schema
19111 Geographic information — Referencing by coordinates
19111-2 Geographic information — Spatial referencing by coordinates
                  — Part 2: Extension for parametric values
19115 Geographic information — Metadata
19118 Geographic information — Encoding
19119 Geographic information — Services
19123 Geographic information — Schema for coverage geometry and functions
19125-1 Simple feature access -  Part 1 common architecture 
19127 Geographic information — Geodetic register
19128 Geographic information — Web map server interface
19135 Geographic information — Procedures for item registration
19136 Geographic information — Geography Markup Language (GML)
19139 Geographic information — XML schema implementation
19144-2 Geographic information - Classification systems — Part 2: Land Cover Meta Language (LCML)
19156 Geographic information — Observations and measurements

How the standards are used in our processes/projects

ISO standards underpin the establishment of the pan-European data infrastructure as defined by the INSPIRE Directive.

The standards are extensively used for the creation of non-legally binding INSPIRE Technical guideline documents.

ISO standards are used as ‘building blocks’ for the:

  • encoding of data and metadata,
  • and network services for discovery, viewing and downloading of data

Benefits for the user

Some larger scale benefits as seen by the European Commission’s JRC:

  • Improved transparency in sharing geospatial data
  • Optimised processes within and between different organisations
  • Easy sharing of data across different borders (e.g. regional, national) and different application domains
  • Better interaction of users and providers of data
  • Minimising the risk of vendor lock-in
  • Standards are a catalyst for data-driven innovation

INSPIRE implementers are encouraged to consider submitting Good implementation practices based on different standards (e.g. ISO) and technologies. Details are available at: https://inspire.ec.europa.eu/portfolio/good-practice-library

Organization
European Commission, Joint Research Centre

Contact person
Alexander Kotsev, September 2020