Webinar on how to develop tests for the new common INSPIRE validator

The Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission is organising a webinar on how to develop tests for the new common INSPIRE validator.

After a period of testing at JRC and with interested validation experts, version 1.0 of the common INSPIRE validator will be released shortly and presented in a workshop during the 2017 INSPIRE Conference.

The current version of the validator covers tests for the INSPIRE TGs on metadata (v1.3), download services (Atom and WFS) and Annex I data themes. In order to arrive at a complete INSPIRE test framework, additional tests need to be developed, e.g. for the new version (2.0) of the metadata TGs, view services, Annex II+III themes and other download service options (SOS, WCS). Also, some Member States or thematic communities may want to add their own tests on top of the existing ones.

A webinar will take place on Monday, 3rd of July from 14:30-16:00 CEST  to inform about the current status of the validator and to introduce the steps necessary for developing additional tests to be added into the INSPIRE test framework. A recording of the webinar will also be made available as a reference for interested test developers.

If you would like to try out the validator and provide your feedback, please feel free to contact us at are3na@jrc.ec.europa.eu  and visit the INSPIRE Validation GitHub repository.

Background

The INSPIRE Directive entered into force in 2007, establishing an infrastructure for spatial information. Given the generic nature of the Directive, Implementing Rules that must be adopted by the Member States together with Technical Guidelines that help Member States to comply with these Implementing Rules have been developed.

To help implementers of INSPIRE to test conformance, the European Commission has decided to develop one single Test Framework to overcome discrepancies in conformance testing across Member States. This common validator will help to overcome the drawback of having incompatible test results over different test frameworks from country to country by standardising the testing process. Furthermore, it will also help implementers of INSPIRE to test conformance and develop solutions which are validated as INSPIRE compliant using a single, official and common validation process. This will result in an optimisation of efforts when it comes to the development of INSPIRE compliant geolocation solutions.