Question (NPOC)

Article 7 (3) of the Directive stipulates that Member States shall ensure that all newly collected and extensively restructured spatial data sets and the corresponding spatial data services are available in conformity with the implementing rules referred to in paragraph 1 within two years of their adoption. The view services with which data shall be ready by May 2010?

Answer (EC Inspire Team)

The availability of a "view" service is not constrained by the availability of data specifications. One condition has to be met however, according to Article 11.1 - Network services shall be established and operated for spatial data sets and services for which metadata have been created".

For Annex I and II the metadata has to be created by 3 December 2010.

For datasets meeting these conditions, discovery and view services need to be operational by 9 November 2011. The type of 'view' will be in a form left to the Member State to decide until the spatial data sets are requested to be harmonized also from a viewing perspective.

For Annex III, the metadata has to be created by 3 December 2013. Hence, "view" services are obligatory after this date.

(WS Legal Issues 17.06.2010)

Question (NPOC)

The Directive requires that common Implementing Rules (IR) are adopted in a number of specific areas (Metadata, Data Specifications, Network Services, Data and Service Sharing and Monitoring and Reporting). These IRs are adopted as Commission Decisions or Regulations, and are binding in their entirety. The IRs enter into force on different dates. The difficulty for this is that this is not in the same order as a production process.

(...)

d) Metadata of services is possible after services are available.

Answer (EC Inspire Team)

(...)

d) For what concerns metadata, the dependency with the discovery service has been taken into account and translated into the request to have metadata produced before the availability of the discovery service.

For Annex I and II the metadata has to be created by 3 December 2010.

For datasets meeting these conditions, discovery and view services need to be operational by 9 November 2011. The type of 'view' will be in a form left to the Member State to decide until the spatial data sets are requested to be harmonized also from a viewing perspective.

For Annex III, the metadata has to be created by 3 December 2013. Hence, "view" services are obligatory after this date.

(WS Legal Issues 17.06.2010)

Request for complementary clarifications (NPOC) and Answer (EC Inspire Team)

I would like clarification on the following issue regarding View Services and their use in portals for the inspection/evaluation of data/datasets.

  • View Services need to be operational for Annex I & II datasets this year.
  • View Services may be consumed by clients ie applications.
  • A specific client is the portal/geoportal which is designed to assist someone discover and inspect/evaluate data from one or more sources and one or more themes regarding fitness for purpose in an application.
  • Most member states will build such a portal and we would expect the European geoportal to fulfil similar evaluation functionality?
  • The generic use case will usually include discovering and selecting one or more datasets and inspecting these (perhaps together) - to determine whether the data and coverage is suitable in an application.

However the commercial public sector data providers in Great Britain are concerned that exposing their data in a portal for evaluation may lead to lost commercial opportunities (eg where a 3rd party might inspect the data in the portal (UK or EU) and thereby avoid payment for the data).

Suggestion A: One of the data providers has suggested offering a fragment sample image of each national charged-for dataset (eg topographic data)

Suggestion B: Alternatively - one approach would be to degrade the data image resolution and supply full coverage (watermarking is another option we can use within the member state – but other portals would need to accept this as well).

Suggestion C: Where the temporal nature of the data is of commercial value (eg meteorological data – current conditions) an out of date version of the dataset might (eg no more than six months old) could satisfy discovery/evaluation portal needs?

In each case (A-C above) the current full coverage would be offered in conjunction with some form of charging arrangements.

Question 1: would suggestion A be acceptable within INSPIRE and the INSPIRE geoportal for evaluation purposes?
Question 2: would suggestion B be acceptable within INSPIRE and the INSPIRE geoportal for evaluation purposes?
Question 3: would watermarking of datasets be acceptable within the INSPIRE geoportal for evaluation purposes?
Question 4: would suggestion C be acceptable within INSPIRE and the INSPIRE geoportal for evaluation purposes?

We understand that 'commercial public sector data providers in the United Kingdom are concerned that exposing their data in a portal for evaluation may lead to lost commercial opportunities'.

For what concerns the commercial interests of the data providers, Art. 14 (3) specifies that "Data made available through the view services may be in a form preventing their reuse for commercial purposes".

We have however to remind here that the view services have also to respect the provisions of Art. 11, where a number of features for those services are specified: "as a minimum, to display, navigate, zoom in/out, pan, or overlay viewable spatial data sets and to display legend information and any relevant content of metadata". Services "shall take into account relevant user requirements and shall be easy to use, available to the public (...).

Any implementation of Article 14 (3) must therefore reconcile the 'commercial' objectives with the ones defined at Art. 11. Also, Art. 14 (3) can be used "for preventing the reuse for commercial purposes", which is not directly equivalent to "preventing [any] loss of commercial opportunities". For example, the prevention of the reuse for NON commercial purposes is not covered by Art. 14 (3).

It is difficult to express in a specific and unambiguous way, in general terms, what can be allowed to prevent the reuse for commercial purposes without infringing on the obligations laid down in the directive.

The typology of data plays a role (the value of viewing a satellite image is of course different from the value of viewing a vector dataset as an image), as well as the respect of the "relevant user requirements" mentioned at Art. 11. 'Evaluation' of the fitness-for-purpose may be such a requirement.

So, under the condition that only for a specific case it would be possible to express a more precise evaluation (without saying that ultimately, it is only up to the European Court of Justice to assess what is compliant or not with INSPIRE ...), we are of the opinion that the possibility to view the full coverage (or subset according to the user requirement) , (reasonably) degraded or watermarked stands a better change to pass the users' scrutiny than the visualisation of samples of the full dataset, or the visualization of outdated versions.

  • Keine Stichwörter