The INSPIRE Directive aims to create a European Union spatial data infrastructure for the purposes of EU environmental policies and policies or activities which may have an impact on the environment. This European Spatial Data Infrastructure will enable the sharing of environmental spatial information among public sector organisations, facilitate public access to spatial information across Europe and assist in policy-making across boundaries.
INSPIRE is based on the infrastructures for spatial information established and operated by the Member States of the European Union. The Directive addresses 34 spatial data themes needed for environmental applications.
The Directive came into force on 15 May 2007 and will be implemented in various stages, with full implementation required by 2021.
This video provides an overview of why INSPIRE is needed and what types of spatial are covered by INSPIRE.
Over the past decades the European Union has put in place a broad range of environmental legislation to protect, preserve and improve Europe’s environment for present and future generations. However, many challenges persist and these must be tackled together in a structured way. The 7th Environment Action Programme (EAP), guiding European environment policy until 2020, identifies the priority areas where more action is needed and ascertains INSPIRE as one of the instruments of the enabling framework to meet these goals.
INSPIRE is about efficiently sharing digital spatial data related to the environment between public authorities at all levels of government, across borders and with the public at large. Such requires effective coordination between all authorities involved and a high degree of legal and technical interoperability, which is also pursued in the context of the EU Digital Single Market.
As such, the INSPIRE Conference 2016 also aims to show how the implementation of INSPIRE contributes to the European Interoperability Framework and the EU’s digital economy in general. The INSPIRE Conference 2016 takes place in Barcelona, 26-30 September 2016.
Program of the activities related to Citizen Observatories at the INSPIRE Conference 2016
Barcelona, Monday September 26th – Wednesday September 28th, 2016
Abstract
Current society requires easy, reliable and quick access to environmental information published by various organizations and initiatives. The environment questions cover many activities that produce various sorts of data. They are connected with natural risks and hazards (e.g. floods, forest fires), pollution and contamination of air, soil or water, degradation of landscape (e.g. deforestation, erosion, slide processes), scientific research (ecology, geographical sciences), historical landscape memory (landscape ecological research), education and raising public awareness and business activities (e.g. eco-tourism, ecological farms, ecological food production). Local and community activities capture local knowledge in multimedia forms including videos, photos or oral histories. The collected information can contribute to up-to-date data. Volunteered geographic information (VGI) is the harnessing of tools to create, assemble, and disseminate geographic data provided voluntarily by individuals . In the context of voluntary data collection, an important part is the way how data are processed. An example can be Neogeography (New Age Geography) focused on combining geotagged data (e.g. KML ) with a map interface for contextualised exploration. In Neogeography data can be from volunteers (VGI) or from professionals and can be open or with restricted access. Neogeography is closely related to Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), Web 2.0 and mapping capabilities of the geospatial web. VGI and Citizens Observatories INSPIRE Hack will be the first hackathon combined with a INSPIRE conference with the aim to create the space, where those with the interest in the potential of VGI and Citizens Observatories can meet, present their tools and components from existing projects and discuss and explore how results, ideas and knowledge can be combined in possible ways for new projects and for new project ideas. VGI and Citizens Observatories INSPIRE Hack will run through the first three days of the INSPIRE conference. There might be an option also for continuing the hackathon for the last two days of the conference. The first session will present projects and tools dealing with VGI Information and Citizen Observatories namely: CITI-SENSE, COBWEB, WeSenseIt, SDI4Apps, Open Transport Net, FOODIE The second session will present new projects and project ideas for VGI and Citizens Observatories/Citizen Science – in particular: SCENT, Ground Truth 2.0, LandSense, GROW and potentially other ideas from the participants.
Monday September 26th
VGI and Citizen Observatories INSPIRE Hack
Karel Charvat, Arne J. Berre, Tomas Mildorf, Bente Lilja Bye and Sven Schade
1100 – 1230: First block –Introduction to the new CO projects, and results from the existing projects
10 minutes Introduction – purpose of VGI and Citizen Observatories INSPIRE Hack Karel Charvat, Arne Berre, Tomas Mildorf, Bente
10 minutes – Why is VGI and Citizen Observatories important for INSPIRE, Copernicus and GEOSS, Jose Miguel Rubio Iglesias, (prev. EU Commission)
30 minutes: Short presentations of the software needs/ planned results of the 4 new CO projects (The full projects will be presented in the VGI/CO sessions on Wednesday)
SCENT – Anastasia
Ground Truth 2.0 – Joan Masó
LandSense _ Ian McCallum
GROW – Andy
30 minutes: Short presentations of the results of the 3 remaining CO projects and Citclops (The full projects will be presented in the VGI/CO sessions on Wednesday – and the results that will be worked on/discussed in the workshop will be presented also in more detail in the challenges in the second block after lunch)
SDI4App, : FOODIE, OpenTrasnportNet: Karel and Tomas
CITI-SENSE: Arne and Alena and Leo
Citclops (Luigi, 1000001 Labs)
WeSenseIt: Suvodeep
Tuesday September 27th
0900 – 1200: VGI and Citizen Observatories INSPIRE Hack – session continued – working in teams/groups based on discussions from end of Monday
1230 – 1330: Plenary: Interim report and consolidation of group/team work
1400 – 1600: VGI and Citizen Observatories INSPIRE Hack – work session finalisation (in groups as decided in the previous plenary)
1630 – 1800: Plenary: Final report and consolidation of group/team work – discussion on future work – input for the Wednesday conference sessions on Citizen Science/Crowd sourcing
Barcelona, Wednesday September 28th, 2016 (0900 – 1800)
INSPIRE’2016
Citizen science/crowd sourcing track
Wednesday September 28th
Citizen science/crowd sourcing
| 09:00 | Open Land Use Map and Smart Points of Interest | Tomas Mildorf |
| 09:15 | VGI and INSPIRE – Introduction | Karel Charvat |
| 09:30 | SensLog – way to standardize VGI data collection. | Karel Charvat |
| 09:45 | VGI profile for Precision Farming: unified data model and applications | Tomas Reznik |
| 10:00 | COBWEB; Facilitator of Citizen Science | Jamie Williams |
Citizen science/crowd sourcing
| 14:00 | Open transport net – Making your transport related open data more useful for your local community | Lieven Raes |
| 14:15 | SCENT – Smart Toolbox for Engaging Citizens into a People – Centric Observation Web | Athanasia Tsertou |
| 14:30 | Open Transport Map – Inspire – based dataset of route network for Europe | Jan Jezek |
| 14:45 | From citizen – based data collection to joint knowledge creation: the Ground Truth 2.0 citizen observatories | Uta Wehn |
| 15:00 | WeSenseIt Citizen Water Observatories – Collected Data and Reusable Software and Tools | Suvodeep Mazumdar |
Citizen science/crowd sourcing
| 16:00 | INSPIRE Species Distribution: A ‘ Bottom – Up ‘ Approach | Christian Aden |
| 16:15 | POSEIDON , INSPIRE updated citizen science project | Andrej Abramic |
| 16:30 | Landsense: A Citizen Observatory and Innovation Marketplace for Land Use and Land Cover Monitoring | Ian Mccallum |
| 16:45 | CITI – SENSE Citizen Observatory for Air Quality – Collected Data and Reusable Software and Tools | Alena Bartonova / Arne J. Berre |
| 17:00 | Citizens and air quality: do the information supply and demand match? | Alena Bartonova |
| 17:15 | GROW– Citizen Science project | Andy |
Citizens Observatories Community Activity in GEO
You can find info on the GEO Work Programme here: http://www.earthobservations.org/geoss_wp.php. The GEO Work Programme is the primary coordination and planning instrument to assist GEO with the selection and prioritization of its activities. Currently there is a 2016 Transitional Work Programme, but as of January 2017 we will have a Work Programme with a 2017-2019 time-span. This will be adopted by the GEO Plenary in St Petersburg.
The GEO Work Programme provides the framework for implementing agreed activities by GEO Members and Participating Organisations. It is organized into four major parts describing the proposed activities subdivided according to the four implementation mechanisms defined in the GEO Strategic Plan through 2025 (full text here). One of the GEO mechanisms are the so-called “Community Activities“. Community Activities allow stakeholders to cooperate flexibly in a bottom-up fashion and with a low initiation cost. They can include a broad variety of activities with varying degrees of coordination. GEO Community Activities may, for example, define user needs, explore new frontier applications or demonstrate technical possibilities, or agree on specific observation or analysis protocols and data exchange. In conclusion, Community Activities are light instruments that help coordinate existing activities and link them with the rest of the GEO community.
Citizens’ observatories and related activities have been recognised as part of the GEOSS components with the new Strategic Plan, but so far there has been limited visibility within GEO. There is scope to propose a GEO Community Activity on citizens’ observatories and citizen science, where all the discussions currently ongoing about standards and best practices regarding interoperability and discoverability of this kind of data, as well as engagement methodologies, can be put in the GEO context. This can also bring in Citizen Science associations and many other actors, which is an opportunity for further engagement (as also included in the recent draft of the Engagement Strategy). This community activity can, and should, be open to activities beyond the EU funded CO projects (ideally also activities beyond Europe!)
Draft activities and outputs planned for 2017-2019:
- Promotion of the use of standards and best practices for the management of citizen-acquired data
- Investigation of algorithms for the integration of citizen-acquired data and other data sources
- Promotion of environmental governance using citizen-science approaches
- Promotion of demonstration case studies, such as the H2020 citizens’ observatories, within the GEO community
- Building a GEO community of practice around citizen observatories by linking to existing initiatives such as European Citizen Science Association (ECSA)
- Addressing potential synergies with other GEO initiatives such as GEO BON and GEOGLAM
- Collecting best practices for discovery and access to this kind of citizen-observed data through the GCI/GEOSS
- Research the motivations and incentives that stimulate citizen participation within the observatories
- Study how the Data Management Principles can be supported and implemented by CO
- Consider strategies for CO long term data preservation
- In coordination with the in-situ task in GEOSS, determine the best way to combine CO data with other in-situ data
- Consider the power of in-situ data to calibrate/validate RS data