Feeling INSPIRED?
Give your opinion on the 'Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Union'.
The European Commission is asking for opinions about the 'Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community' Directive. Known as INSPIRE, it's a pan-European initiative to help governments, citizens and businesses share geographic, social-economic and environmental data. The consultation aims to collect feedback on the experiences of individual users and producers of such spatial data working for public authorities, for the private and academic sector or as individual citizens, with a view to improving the provision of information for policies and activities having an impact on the environment.
Responses to problems like air pollution, biodiversity loss and preventing natural disasters require good quality data and environmental information, which the INSPIRE Directive was designed to provide. The Directive has been in place since 2007, and the Commission is now looking for ways to adapt it to subsequent developments.
The consultation is open to all. Respondents with experience of INSPIRE are especially welcome, and will be asked for views on topics such as the level of documentation of the spatial data and services, and whether or not INSPIRE facilitates the use, discovery, view and download of the spatial data and services they need. Views on the services provided by the European geo-portal and other gateways to geo-information are also welcome.
Respondents are asked to give their opinion on the relevance of INSPIRE, the utility of its actions, its cost-efficiency and implementation. The European Commission is also interested to find out if they identified positive and/or negative spill-over effects of INSPIRE in the field of environmental policy and in relation to other policies such as eGovernment.
The consultation is available in all EU languages.
Next Steps
The results of this public consultation will contribute to the INSPIRE policy evaluation. Results will be reported to all stakeholders and to the European Parliament and Council in 2014. This may lead to remedial policy action necessary to adapt current approaches and re-align them with the original objectives of INSPIRE and the objectives of the EU 2020 strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth.
Background
The policy evaluation of INSPIRE is required by the Commission when a report on implementation of a policy needs to be presented to the Council and European Parliament. The evaluation also takes into account the REFIT Communication of 2 October 2013 in which the Commission set out modalities for a comprehensive review of certain pieces of legislation.
The online consultation is available from the following web link:http://ec.europa.eu/yourvoice/consultations/index_en.htm
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