About the INSPIRE Geoportal

The INSPIRE Directive requires the Commission to establish a community geoportal as an access point to the Member States infrastructures through network services. The Member States may also provide access to those services through their own access points.

The new INSPIRE Geoportal builds on the experience of running the INSPIRE Geoportal Pilot and supports several actions of the INSPIRE Maintenance and Implementation Work Programme (MIWP) 2016-2020, especially regarding the simplification of use and availability of priority data sets for environmental reporting.

The Geoportal provides the means to:

  • monitor the availability of INSPIRE data sets;
  • discover suitable data sets based on their descriptions (metadata);
  • access the selected data sets through their view or download services.

The Geoportal now focuses on displaying metadata about data sets and on directly downloading and/or viewing them through network services. Therefore, it will display service metadata only in the context of the data sets to which they provide access (and no longer as stand-alone resources).

The metadata used in the Geoportal is regularly harvested from currently 36 discovery services of EU Member States and EFTA countries. The status of harvesting is available here.

The INSPIRE Geoportal currently supports two main applications:

  • The Priority Data Sets Viewer displays the availability and provides access to the selected priority data sets used for environmental reporting as defined by Action 2016.5 of the MIWP 2016-2020;
  • The INSPIRE Thematic Viewer displays the availability and provides access to all data sets provided by EU Member States and EFTA countries under the INSPIRE Directive and allows filtering by data themes (i.e. Annex I, II and III) and countries.

In both application, data discovery, view and download have been simplified for the users by applying the following pre-defined thematic and spatial filters:

  • The thematic filtering is based on the metadata keywords identifying INSPIRE Spatial Data Themes or Priority Data Sets.
  • The filtering by spatial extent (“Show data with National coverage" checkbox) is based on an approximate procedure that compares the bounding boxes of country borders (using Eurostat's NUTS 0 data) with the bounding boxes provided in each metadata record and assumes a "national coverage" if the overlap is larger than 80%. Therefore, the results should be interpreted as indicative only.

We are constantly working to improve the Geoportal and will be adding further "Views" based on emerging user demand. We are also encouraging users to provide any feedback related to functionality as well as data availability. Please, provide your feedback here.