Because the original and essential value of spatial data ' data that refer to specific geographical locations or areas ' lies in environmental decision-making, such data mostly originate in the public sector and are made available to people,

The Availability of Spatial and Environmental Data in the European Union

This highly technical work is at the leading edge of spatial analysis. It covers the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) initiative in the international context of access to environmental data. This book identifies the data policy issues, such as intellectual property rights, privacy, licensing and archiving policies, that affect environmental monitoring organisations, statistical institutes, mapping agencies, institutes for natural resources and Earth observation. It recommends courses of action to improve information services in GMES and assesses the impact of data policy on access to and cost-efficient use of information services in GMES. This title will be essential reading for government institutions such as mapping organisations, space agencies, environmental departments, military and defence departments; it will also be useful to students of environmental policies and industries involved in mapping, cartography, aerial surveys and the space industry.

Directive 2007/2/EC (INSPIRE) entered into force in 2007 with the goal to establish a European Union (EU) Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) to support EU's environmental policies. The Directive was complemented by a complex legal framework detailing requirements on data provision, which was in turn accompanied by technical guidelines and the establishment of a governance structure involving Member States in the maintenance and evolution of the Directive. After more than 10 years since its inception and at the end of its legally defined roadmap leading to the evaluation by 1 January 2022, INSPIRE has entered a new milestone as the European Commission's recent focus on the green and digital transformation holds the potential to make it a key tool for the successful (environmental) data sharing in Europe. The objective of this report is twofold. First, we summarise the main developments of the pan-European INSPIRE SDI happened so far from the technical and organisational perspectives, describing the current implementation state of play through multiple dimensions: data availability, governance approaches, available technological stack, influence and role of standardisation bodies and community development. This precedes a critical assessment of what has, and has not, worked well in the development of the infrastructure. Building on such lessons learnt, in the second part of the report we offer a vision for the future evolution of the INSPIRE SDI with a five to ten year horizon in mind. This ambitious vision takes into consideration the current EU policy context as well as the disruptive technological trends bringing new data sources, actors, standards and architectures as new players in the (geospatial) data sharing field. The vision is structured around a set of legal, organisational and technological actions, which are largely extensible to any policy-driven SDI. This makes the lessons learned from INSPIRE also applicable to the broader field of data initiatives. The key conclusion of this report, embedded in the vision, is that in order to remain fit for purpose it is desirable that traditional SDIs evolve from complex and highly specialised frameworks to more sustainable, flexible and agile data ecosystems, lowering the entry level to non-specialists and welcoming an increased participation from less traditional stakeholders (e.g. open source software communities, standardisation bodies and early adopters) in addition to data providers and users. Concretely, at the European level this highlights the need to simplify and modernise the INSPIRE technological framework and to establish a distributed governance structure at multiple levels. It would be hard to imagine a more effective way for INSPIRE to blend within the common European data space envisioned by the recent European Strategy for Data, allowing a seamless and user-centric data exploitation to address an increasing range of societal needs.

Understanding the legal challenges relating to spatial data information (SDI).

Land use change is driven by a variety of forces, including spatial policies formulated at supra-national, national, regional and local levels. The main focus of this book is to contextualise, explain and illustrate a new methodology for simulating land use change in different parts of Europe. It considers some of the more important causal factors and identifies state-of-the-art approaches to modelling human and environmental systems, and for evaluating and visualising altenative scenarios. The last part of the volume presents material from two case studies, one from The Netherlands and one from Portugal, of the implementation of a new simulation model called EuroScanner. Audience: This work will be of interest to researchers and practioners whose work involves geography, simulation and modelling, environmental planning, spatial decision making, the methodology of social sciences, and economics.

This book covers some of the most prevalent policy issues evolving around spatial data infrastructure. First, the book addresses a variety of European SDI projects aiming at the creation of regional spatial data infrastructure. Secondly, the Dutch and American situation are described, providing insights on how two rather different legal and economic SDI settings can still allow for and serve very similar infrastructure functions. Keywords: spatial data infrastructures, development, legal and economic, Europe, United States, Netherlands.