These are the slides from Spatineo Webinar held online on 26th March 2015. For the video recording of the webinar, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-1Ni3i4M-s

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Spatineo
Linnankoskenkatu 16 A 17
FI-00250 Helsinki
+358 20 703 2210
Shedding Light on
INSPIRE Conformity
Starting soon at 10:00 CET
Spatineo Webinar

2. Copyright Spatineo
About Ilkka Rinne
• Founder & CTO of Spatineo
• INSPIRE & OGC implementation expert
• Professional user interface designer &
software architect.
• Facilitator of an expert group on
INSPIRE validation & conformity
testing in early 2015.
• An active member in other INSPIRE
expert groups.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/iorin

3. Copyright Spatineo
Spatineo Inc.
• Independent European software company for
quality assurance of Spatial Web Services.
• Founded in 2011 in Helsinki, Finland.
• Offices in Helsinki & Berlin.
• SaaS tools for availability monitoring, usage
analytics and performance testing of online
Spatial Web Services.
• Our business is to support building Spatial
Data Infrastructures that work in practice.

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Webinar topics
• The vision: A working European Spatial Data Infrastructure
• The kick in the buttocks: the INSPIRE directive
• What does INSPIRE conformity mean legally and in practice?
• Current tools for checking conformity
• Work in progress: INSPIRE maintenance
• Validation & conformity testing (MIWP-5)
• Building the common INSPIRE validator using the best practices
from the Open Source world.
• What do I need to do as data or software provider?
• INSPIRE conformity Q&A
• Send questions using the chat at anytime during the webinar.

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Lots of reusable data
Geographical names
Administrative units
Real-estate & land-parcels
Transport networks Land use & buildings
Human health statistics
Environment observation
networks & data
Population & demography
Ocean regions and features
Rivers, lakes, coastal waters
Species, habitats and
protected areas
Energy & mineral resources
Water & energy supply networks Weather & climate

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A European Spatial Data
Infrastructure
• Collect and maintain data at the origin, use relevant sub-
sets of it anywhere over the Internet.
• Use it like electricity from the wall socket: You can almost
forget it when it’s working properly.
• Well-informed decisions based on up-to-date information
• Enables spatial data based business with small up-front costs
• Effortless reuse of those precious spatial datasets requires
good discoverability, data harmonisation and high service
availability.
• INSPIRE is a means to an end: use a little legal pressure to
make the EU member states cross the implementation
barrier.

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Spatial Data Infrastructure
The best, up-to-date data
always from the origin
Efficient extraction
of reusable data
Available for all at any time

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Thriving as data collaborators
• In a working SDI most participants will be both
Data Providers and Data Users.
• Your datasets will be used as self-service.
• No customer-specific formats or manual extraction.
• Little control over the use of your data.
• You will be able to rely on other’s datasets to be
available and reusable in your everyday work.
• Your data & service quality builds (or breaks)
your reputation and public image.

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Working SDI in practice

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Poll 1
Could you rely on remotely hosted
data and services in your daily work
instead of using locally installed
spatial data sets?
What is the biggest hurdle in your
point of view?

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INSPIRE Directive
• Legal regulation driving European Union
member states to create a European SDI.
• A really long project: 2007 - 2020: time
(enough?) for all member states to solidify their
services and harmonize the identified datasets.
• Europe-wide legislation: difficult to change.
Thus cannot technically be very detailed.
“Requirements that would not be hopelessly
outdated in 10 years”.

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Technical Guidance
• The recommended ways to implement INSPIRE.
• Not legal text, much easier to keep up with
changing technology.
• Detailed, technology-bound solutions to fulfilling
the legal INSPIRE requirements.
• If a member state decides not to follow these,
they have to make an extra effort to prove that
their solution still fulfills the INSPIRE directive
requirements.
“Make INSPIRE work in practice”

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34 INSPIRE data themes
“Annex” word refers to the theme grouping used in the INSPIRE
directive: Themes in different annexes have different
implementation dead-lines.
Annex I
Annex II
Annex III
http://inspire.ec.europa.eu/index.cfm/pageid/2/list/7

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http://inspire.ec.europa.eu/index.cfm/pageid/44
We are here now

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INSPIRE Conformity?
• Legal point of view: conform to the directive text.
• Practical point of view: Conform to the requirements
stated in the Technical Guidance (TG) documents.
• Automatic testing tools for INSPIRE
implementations only feasible for the detailed
technical requirements.
• Conformity testing baseline: TG requirements.
• Aim to help the data providers.
• No official INSPIRE conformity testing or
certification exists (at least not yet).

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Some existing conformity
tools for INSPIRE
• The INSPIRE Geoportal Metadata Validator
http://inspire-geoportal.ec.europa.eu/validator2/
• Comprehensive testing for metadata, but a bit slow, UI could be better,
timeout issues sometimes. Free.
• Spatineo Monitor & Spatineo Performance https://www.spatineo.com/
• WMS & WMTS capabilities validation, emphasis on service availability
monitoring, usage analytics & capacity testing. 30-days free trial.
• GDI-DE test suite https://testsuite.gdi-de.org/gdi/
• Metadata, WMS & Atom validation, QoS testing. Free (registration)
• ELF (ESDIN) test framework http://elfproject.eu/documentation/geotool/etf
• View & Download service & dataset validation, QoS testing
More validation tools: https://ies-svn.jrc.ec.europa.eu/projects/validation-and-conformity-testing/wiki/
Overview_about_existing_validation_toolssolutions

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Poll 2
How is your organisation currently
checking INSPIRE conformity?

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European SDI is not ready
• INSPIRE is still work-in-progress.
• INSPIRE Maintenance and Implementation
Group (MIG) and it’s technical sub-group are
currently working on (among others):
• SOS & WCS Download service profiles (MIWP-7a),
• Metadata TG update (MIWP-8),
• Yearly monitoring improvements (MIWP-16, “INSPIRE
dashboard”),
• Validation & conformity testing (MIWP-5)
MIG-T wiki with the current work programme: https://ies-svn.jrc.ec.europa.eu/projects/mig-inspire

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MIWP-5: Validation &
conformity testing
• Need for more reliable validation tools for
INSPIRE metadata, services and datasets.
• Different validators exists, but the results differ
somewhat from each other due to different
interpretations of the requirements.
• No official INSPIRE conformity testing or
certification for software products.
• No official reference implementations for
INSPIRE validators.
MIWP-5 wiki: https://ies-svn.jrc.ec.europa.eu/projects/validation-and-conformity-testing/wiki

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Test Suites & validators
• Abstract Test Suite (ATS): How the requirements should
be tested in any of the validator implementations?
• Validation result harmonisation between validators.
• Executable Test Suite (ETS): a particular implementation
of ATS tests that can be run on a computer.
• INSPIRE validator Reference Implementation(s) are examples of
these, but not necessarily the only ones.
• Goal: Create a comprehensive official INSPIRE validator
• Open Source license, ETS parts embeddable as libraries
• Free online service with Web UI and an API
• Up-to-date, well-documented and properly maintained.

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Open Source approach
• Github, wikis, community engagement
• Change management & governance
• INSPIRE MIG: manage the changes in TGs, ATSes and ETS
Reference Implementations.
• INSPIRE experts & validator software implementers: find
problems and provide feedback & change requests for ATS &
ETS code.
• Options for validation software providers:
• Use the official ETS RIs as part of their own validators.
• Remotely call the online INSPIRE validator API.
• If nothing else works: Implement their own ETS “ports” based
on the agreed ATS rules.

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Status (March 2015)
• Draft versions for ATS tests created for WMS, WMTS, Atom
and Metadata have been done by a temporary expert group
• Workshop in Dec 2014
• ATS repos: https://github.com/inspire-eu-validation
• Final report: http://bit.ly/mdns_conf_report
• Things to be done:
• ATSes for the remaining Network Services.
• Use case based requirements for the validator(s).
• INSPIRE validator Reference Implementation(s) software for
metadata, services and datasets.
• Expert group members mostly working on a voluntary
basis.

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Data provider 1-2-3-4
1. Define your datasets according to one or
more INSPIRE Data Specifications.
2. Describe the datasets and your services
according to the INSPIRE Metadata guidance.
Publish & maintain your metadata records in
an INSPIRE Discovery Service.
3. Design map visualizations for your datasets
and publish them in an INSPIRE View Service.
4. Make your datasets available and extractable
using an INSPIRE Download Service.

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Software provider 1-2-3-4
1. Make sure your software is compliant with the
relevant OGC standards (WMS, WFS, CSW, GML).
2. Make sure that it’s possible to use the INSPIRE
extensions in the published View, Download and
Discovery services and metadata records.
3. Make sure that your software can ingest and/or
produce INSPIRE datasets according to the Data
Specifications for the Themes you support.
4. Test that your software makes it possible to fulfill
the INSPIRE Quality of Service requirements with
realistic datasets and computing resources.

25. Copyright Spatineo
Fresh Spatial Data as
Everyday Commodity
Available always 24/7
Plug and play:
it just works