CAN A LEGAL FRAMEWORK HELP US TO SHARE GEOSCIENCE KNOWLEDGE? THE EXPERIENCE OF INSPIRE IN EUROPE

Delivering geoscience data, information and knowledge to users in the Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) paradigm means that the content generated by the providers must be made available through specific technical standards, organisational and legal requirements. These standards and requirements are supposed to facilitate the information sharing and re-use within a community (i.e. between geologists), between different scientific communities (i.e. dealing with climate change), or by the citizen.

Building an SDI is not just about exposing scientific data through standardised web services (such as WMS web map services), it is also an occasion to redefine the information products, to specialize them according to the target (experts, professional, citizen), and build new applications that aggregate, analyse, combine contents. According to the interoperability principles of service oriented architectures (SOA), these new applications can be developed by combining sources of information and software components from different providers, through new forms of partnerships.

In order to develop this type of geo-information ecosystem, Europe has decided to setup a European SDI through a very ambitious legal framework called INSPIRE. This framework will be applied to most of the digital geo-information that is produced by public authorities in Europe. Therefore, a lot of implementing rules are developed to define the technical standards to be used for the web services, and for describing the data content (metadata, data models…) that will be delivered.

The OneGeology-Europe project is a prototype of the implementation of INSPIRE at the scale of the European Geological Surveys.