INSPIRE is "an EU initiative to establish an infrastructure for spatial information in Europe.
INSPIRE is legislation, that requires Government and Public bodies within the European Union, to make important spatial dataset information available.
INSPIRE makes available a number of technical guidance documentation intended to assist such government bodies make their information available using OGC (and other) services like:
- CSW for Discovery (metadata)
- WMS for Viewing (images of data)
- Atom, SOS, WCS, or WFS for Download (get the raw data).
- WPS for Transformation
The EU gathers and republishes INSPIRE metadata (for services, data sets and data series) through its GeoPortal
INSPIRE maintains a registry of terms (controlled vocabularies) to be used in service/data metadata to enable data harmonization.
INSPIRE services need to be able to supply data based on the European Terrestrial Reference System 1989 (ETRS89) datum.
Also see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrastructure_for_Spatial_Information_in_the_European_Community
