INSPIRE - What is it?
This page is intended to be a plain English overview of INSPIRE. There are plenty of other sources for finding out more detailed information, including of course the official INSPIRE website - and the text of the Directive can be found on the European Commission's Eur-Lex website
The UK Association of Geographic Information (AGI) has also produced a summary document that provides a very good overview and it can be found on the AGI website
INSPIRE (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe) is an EU Directive that came into force on May 15th 2007.
INSPIRE defines some general rules that are intended to create an Infrastructure for Spatial Data in Europe. Although the initial focus is on EC environmental policies the intention is to make INSPIRE applicable to a wide range of applications and sectors.INSPIRE has been built on the principle that it should be easy to find out what spatial data exists in Europe. Each country should ideally have a set of harmonised data, built using a common overall model, and the EC has defined a list of 34 specific themes (for example height, cadastral parcels, addresses) to be considered. If this data exists it should be possible to find it and then view and access it. The data should be structured in such a way that different datasets can be accessed via network services in ways that allow the data to be overlaid and joined "seamlessly" across international boundaries.
If you need more specific information - including the possibility of workshops and / or more detailed consultancy please see the website of our partner organisation Geolink Consulting Ltd.