At Compass Informatics, we have published our INSPIRE/Spatial Data Infrastructure Solutions Whitepaper to coincide with the opening of our dedicated http://inspire.compass.ie website. 

Please download the Whitepaper by clicking on the logo to the left. This paper describes how Compass Services can provide a full compliance solution to meet the requirements of the European Union INSPIRE Directive... Read More »

Compass Informatics will co-sponsor the CEN/TC 287 Interoperability Workshop to be held on March 1st  in Paris.  This will be a particularly important meeting as it will bring the key organisations of CEN, ISO, Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), and JRC/INSPIRE together with a view towards an agreement of further geo standards developments. Gearóid Ó Riain, managing director of Compass Informatics, will present at the workshop, which will also be attended... Read More »

From 21-22 January 2010, Compass INSPIRE Expert, Roger Longhorn, was a keynote speaker at two workshops conducted in Ankara, Turkey, hosted by the Turkish Satellite Corporation (Turksat), who hold the contract to implement more than 100 e-Government projects for the Turkish government. Creating the national SDI (Spatial Data Infrastructure) is one of these projects, and is being undertaken by the TurksatGlobe division within Turksat. The SDI Feasibility... Read More »

Compass INSPIRE Expert, Roger Longhorn, participated in the EuroSDR workshop on “Atlas of INSPIRE Implementation Methods, on 14-15 January 2010, hosted by IGN Belgium at the Club Prince Albert in Brussels. The workshop was attended by 22 staff representing the official SDI and INSPIRE implementation efforts in 10 countries, including Switzerland and Croatia. The purpose of the meeting, the second in this project, was to review progress to date on building the Atlas of INSPIRE Implementation Methods’, focusing on identifiable ‘best practice’ and challenges that have arisen since INSPIRE was published in 2007. Research staff from SADL at K. U. Leuven Belgium, plus ITC and Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands were on hand, who are involved in the analytical work underpinning the Atlas development. Also present was Luc Van Linden, of 1Spatial, who is part of the team currently developing the Transformation Service Technical Guidelines for INSPIRE.

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The 2nd ESDIN (European Spatial Data Infrastructure with the Best Practice Network) Stakeholders' meeting is being held at EuroGeographics in Paris on 3 February. The ESDIN project team will present the achievements of the project in year one and discuss with the Reference group members, stakeholders, experts from different fields the future of the project. If you want to answer the question how can INSPIRE specifications be implemented or want to... Read More »

On 14-15 January 2010, the EuroSDR project for the “Atlas of INSPIRE Implementation Methods” sponsored a workshop at the Club Prince Albert in Brussels, hosted by IGN, the national mapping agency of Belgium, who are also directly involved in the project. The 22 participants represented 10 EU Member States now embarked on implementing national SDIs and INSPIRE. Also present were a representative from the INSPIRE implementation team at the European Commission and representatives from two of the commercial companies developing some of the interoperability technology needed for INSPIRE, including Compass’ INSPIRE Expert, Roger Longhorn. Several staff from Belgian (KUL) and Dutch (ITC and Univ. of Delft) research centres who have been involved in monitoring and studying various aspects of SDI implementation and impact for a number of years, at both national and pan-European levels, presented their findings to date, based on analysis of questionnaires circulated earlier to the Member State representatives responsible for INSPIRE in their respective counties.

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The INSPIRE Conference 2010 will take place from 23 to 25 June 2010 in Krakow, Poland. On 22 June pre-conference workshops will be organized. The theme of this year’s edition is "INSPIRE as a Framework for Cooperation". The Conference is organised through a series of plenary sessions addressing common policy issues, and parallel sessions focusing in particular on applications and implementations of SDIs, research issues and new and evolving technologies... Read More »

Standards making is a consensus process. This means that an International standard has to be usable and useful world-wide. Within a region such as Europe, a more focused approach is required by developing European specific standards or creating European profiles of existing ISO standards. This is the work of CEN/TC 287 Geographic information. Olaf Ostensen, the chair of ISO/TC 211, will be speaking at the Interoperability Workshop in Paris, 1 March... Read More »

On 26-27 January 2010, the European Commission’s DG Joint Research Centre (JRC) hosted a two-day Stakeholders Workshop in Ispra, Italy, of the FP7 GIGAS Project – an Action in Support to GEOSS, INSPIRE and GMES, which began in June 2008 and ends in May 2010. Compass was represented at the meetings by INSPIRE Expert, Roger Longhorn.

INSPIRE is Europe’s attempt to create a regional (transnational) pan-European SDI. GMES is the Global Monitoring... Read More »

The INSPIRE Directive (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe) was published in April 2007 and was to be adopted into national law by all EU Member States by 15 May 2009. While many States have yet to adopt the enacting legislation in their countries, all are in the process of implementing national SDIs, which must now take account of the specific implementation rules dictated by INSPIRE. These rules are being promulgated as a series of EC Regulations and/or Decisions covering metadata creation and publishing, data and services interoperability, access and sharing principles, and monitoring and reporting requirements. All Member States have one government department appointed as being officially responsible for coordinating implementation of INSPIRE in their countries and acting as the official interface to the European Commission during the implementation period and for later monitoring and reporting activities.

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