Green open data is an essential resource to meet the objectives of the Green Deal, including those related to climate change, the circular economy, pollution, biodiversity and deforestation. Data can enable the development of environmentally friendly transport and energy systems, as well as greener and more sustainable cities.

The public availability and access to environmental data increase the transparency of political, industrial and financial decisions, enhance trust and make all actors accountable to steer for a fair and inclusive green transition that will strengthen environmental democracy. Bringing such data together in a EU common data space will fuel actionable insights and applications that increase the effectiveness of our policies, guide consumers and producers towards more sustainable choices and reduce the costs of the transition.

Being at the end of its implementation roadmap, this 360° track will look back on the past implementation of INSPIRE and dwell on the major findings of the evaluation of the INSPIRE Directive. Packed with experience and lessons learned from the past, the discussion will be opened on how to transform the INSPIRE Directive to a data sharing instrument that will fuel the EU common data space with green open data.

Data driven innovation is a key building block to enable the European Green Deal. Paired with digital technologies, it lies the foundation for the intended sustainability transformations. The EU has adopted two related policy frameworks, the European Green Deal in 2019 and the European strategy for data in 2020. Data spaces are under development in strategic sectors and domains of public interest.

For the European Green Deal data space, INSPIRE is a solid base which will be adapted to the new challenges in the coming years under the “GreenData4All” initiative. Priority work is on data spaces for smart circular applications and zero pollution as well as on Destination Earth.

This track provides through its sessions an overview on the latest development related to new types of data from citizens and sensors as well as advances in electronic reporting and statistical data management and the usage for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Together with the new technologies and infrastructures and the latest policy developments and governance measures discussed in the parallel tracks, conference attendants will be able to get a comprehensive overview of current and future developments.

The emergence of new technologies, standards, alternative data sources and increased user demand has led to the establishment of completely new architectures that provide flexible and scalable solutions for accessing and consuming data. The service interfaces in traditional SDIs (e.g., WMS, WFS, WCS and SOS) are well known and supported by client applications.

However, today, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) provide an opportunity for developers to easily create value-added products. APIs can hide the complexity of upstream infrastructures and offer a set of well-defined and documented methods for data utilisation and processing across various components.

The increased diversity of architectural approaches that we are facing is inevitably impacting SDIs. Whereas in the past data was processed and made available on some sort of centralised server, today depending on the concrete use case, computing can also take place in the network edge (e.g., on sensors devices), fog (e.g., on network gateways), or cloud. This novelty has led to the emergence of data spaces with various complexity that also occur at multiple levels. This track provides overview of new technologies and their impact in changing traditional SDIs towards data spaces.