This year Richard, Debbie and I headed to the 2011 INSPIRE Conference in what turned out to be a sunny Edinburgh. Snowflake has had a stand for the last 3 years and this year was no exception. Aside from our stand Debbie was running an INSPIRE: Back to Basics workshop and Richard was talking about the work our partner Epsilon Italia has been doing within the EU Nature SDI programme - leaving me to kick back - I mean work the stand and network.

What is INSPIRE?

From the positive feedback I received, it seems Debbie's talk found a gap in the conference Agenda by answering the fundamental question - What is INSPIRE? 

Debbie's talk was a subset of our INSPIRE Fundamentals training course mashed up with the results of the INSPIRE Quiz we ran last year.  The thing is with all this implementation work kicking off, INSPIRE people forget that new organisations continue to come across INSPIRE for the very first time.

Looking at the agenda there was talk after talk about experiences, lessons learned and progress made but nothing going back to the start and explaining the basics. Interestingly I was talking to a lady from Canada about Debbie's talk and she mentioned she was over to see if the best practices ofINSPIRE could be reused within Canadian SDI initiatives. Looks like people are looking to implement INSPIRE principles even if you they don't have to under EU legislation.

Implementation experiences

I didn't go with the team to Poland last year, but the numbers were certainly up from Rotterdam, I heard gossip of somewhere between 650-800 attendee - which is a big increase. The general theme this year was implementation experiences, which is reassuring, as this year was the first time animplementation deadline had passed (initial Annex I metadata and View Services). 

Practical experience

Richard's talk on Thursday was about our experience within the Nature SDI programme. Sharing the stage with our good friend Giacomo Martirano from Epsilon Italia, Richard and Giacomo explained how Epsilon Italia used GO Publisher to create INSPIRE data valid to the Protected Sites schema, subsequently deploying an Advanced Download - Direct Access service via our WFS 2.0 implementation.  

The main story we were getting across was that all this could be done without coding, using a COTS product out of the box.

Annex II & III testing

Aside from practical experience, the other big news was the release of the INSPIRE Annex II and AnnexIII schemas.  We know this all too well, with Debbie being an INSPIRE Editor on the Annex III Area Management theme. She's been working flat out with the drafting team to get the first cut of the model and schema out in time for the conference.  In terms of implementation, Annex II and Annex III really widens the reach of INSPIRE. Where in Annex I the majority of the data can be sourced from National Mapping Agencies and larger government departments, data in Annex II and Annex III impacts pretty much all of government inclusive of local, provincial and central, from big departments to small teams, from data in enterprise databases to data in spreadsheets.

In my view, this is real challenge for INSPIRE, getting the little guys to join in was always going to be a hard task both from a budget point of view and from a technical point of view.  To address this Snowflake launched its 'You do it, We do it, We do it together' campaign to cover the Annex II & III testing and a wider bureau service for  Annex I implementation. This new offering provides a number of options for organisations to transform their data into  INSPIRE compliant data:

1) You do it, by using GO Publisher directly (we're providing it for FREE for all registered Annex II & IIItesters),

2) We do it, you throwing your data our way and we'll transform it (for a fixed fee per dataset), or

3) We do it together by running  joint workshop with the aim of transforming your data together.

There you go, three simple options to tick the INSPIRE box.  

Finally, let's talk testing and standards with Steven Ramage

So after a busy 5 days it was time to pack up and head down down South. Before I caught the plane back I caught up with my good friend Steven Ramage from Open Geospatial Consortium and we had a quick chat on all things standards and OGC test beds. You can catch our 10 min video here:http://blogs.snowflakesoftware.com/news/2011/07/talking-testbeds-and-standards-with-steven-ramage-from-ogc.htm

Until the next time....