New INSPIRE Geoportal launched

New INSPIRE Geoportal launched

On 18 September 2018, the European Commission presented the new INSPIRE Geoportal offering easier access to spatial data in the EU. The redesigned portal is a one-stop shop for public authorities, business and citizens to discover, access and use data sets related to the environment in Europe.

All EU countries produce and use geospatial data on, for example, ground water, transport networks, population, land use and air temperature. Threats to the environment or crisis situations do not stop at national or regional boundaries. Therefore, public authorities need to be able to easily access and compare geospatial data across borders. The INSPIRE data infrastructure enables the sharing of such data among public authorities and facilitates public access to spatial information across Europe.

The INSPIRE Geoportal makes it easier to discover, monitor and directly use geospatial data sets relevant for specific application areas, in particular European environmental policy. The new Geoportal provides overviews of the availability of INSPIRE data sets by country and thematic area, and makes the data available ready-for-use in a range of applications.

The Geoportal is based on the metadata regularly harvested from the (currently 36) officially registered national data catalogues of EU Member States and EFTA countries.

The JRC Geoportal Team is constantly working to improve the Geoportal and will be adding further "thematic views" and functionality based on emerging user demand. Users are encouraged to provide any feedback related to functionality as well as data availability here.

The INSPIRE Geoportal was launched at the 2018 INSPIRE Conference in Antwerp, Belgium.

Background

The INSPIRE Directive requires the Commission to establish a community geoportal as an access point to the Member States infrastructures through network services. The Member States may also provide access to those services through their own access points.

The Geoportal is developed by JRC in collaboration with and support from the European Commission's Directorate-General for Environment, Eurostat and the European Environment Agency. It provides access to the spatial data provided in INSPIRE’s data infrastructure. It builds on the experience of running the INSPIRE Geoportal Pilot and supports several actions of the INSPIRE Maintenance and Implementation Work Programme (MIWP) 2016-2020, especially regarding the simplification of use and improving the availability of priority data sets for environmental reporting.