INSPIRE in Norway

INSPIRE, the infrastructure for spatial information in Europe, is an EU initiative which aims to build a European spatial data infrastructure. The aim of the directive is to provide easy access to public sector data through standardisation of data and APIs. Norway has implemented the INSPIRE Directive in Norwegian law.

There are widespread activities throughout Europe to implement spatial data infrastructure based on the INSPIRE Directive. This directive defines requirements for each country relating to issues such as metadata services, view services and download and access services (APIs).

The INSPIRE Directive came into force in 2007. A series of regulations specifying technical requirements has been added since then. The directive focuses mainly on the environment, but it is also key to supporting development of a general, multi-purpose spatial data infrastructure. Implementation of INSPIRE is linked closely with the digitisation of public sector activities.

INSPIRE covers 34 themes such as reference data and thematic data from different sectors; e.g. buildings, constructions, cadastral information, place names, terrain, land use and land cover, oceanography, meteorology, energy and biodiversity.

Norway has adopted the INSPIRE Directive and operates in compliance with all underlying regulations, with the exception of the schedule. Norway and other EEA states (European Economic Area) have postponed implementation deadlines by three years.; Some important deadlines:

15 May 2012: Share data between public agencies
15 May 2013: Develop indicators and report to ESA
3 December 2013: Metadata for the data themes, Annexes I and II
19 October 2014: Share data with EU agencies on standardised terms
9 December 2014: Discovery (search and metadata) services available
9 December 2014: View services available
28 December 2015: Download and transformation services available
3 December 2016: Metadata for Annex III data sets available
23 November 2020: Annex I data available in harmonised form, according to EU (INSPIRE) data models
23 November 2023: Annex III data available in harmonised form, according to EU (INSPIRE) data models

Norwegian INSPIRE action plan

The EU Commission carried out an assessment of the development of INSPIRE within European countries and identified serious delays in implementation. There is still no fully operational European spatial data infrastructure, and the data content and APIs on offer do not meet the needs of the environmental sector. Nor are they compliant with public sector value addition and public sector digitisation policies.

The EU asked each country to develop national action plans for how to proceed and meet the obligations set forth in the INSPIRE Directive. Each country developed such action plans in 2015.

Norway has defined about 200 data sets as INSPIRE data sets. This means this data meets INSPIRE requirements on account of technical standardisation of data, documentation and APIs. The rules are strict, and status reports show that in 2017 Norway is well behind the schedule defined in the Directive, implemented in law in Norway through the Norwegian Geodata Act.

The Norwegian action plan covers necessary actions with a view to meeting the requirements. Most of these actions are to be implemented by responsible national organisations linked in administrative terms to a series of ministries.

The action plan includes actions according to the various INSPIRE requirements, the most important being:

Sharing
Metadata
Map view APIs – view services
Spatial data APIs – download services
Harmonisation of data according to European data models

Links

A brief overview of the action plan, in English, is available here
The full version Norwegian Action Plan, in Norwegian, is available here

General Norwegian performance

The EU Commission has used reporting processes to assess each country and rated them according to their performance. Norway and other EEA countries have not been assessed by the Commission. Using similar methodology, their performance has been defined as follows:

The main challenges involve delivery of download services/APIs and data harmonisation.

INSPIRE and environmental reporting

The INSPIRE Directive is an environmental directive aiming to support use in EU policies relating to the environment. One particular issue involves coordinating the reporting of spatial data from each country, as defined in different environmental directives. There are ongoing efforts to identify and clarify which data can be termed spatial data (LOPD – list of priority data sets), implementation priority and the standards and harmonisation of data models that are to be used.

The Norwegian INSPIRE data set status tool

The Norwegian INSPIRE data set status tool shows the performance for each data set in greater detail.

Norwegian participation in EU activities

Norway is participating in a variety of groups:

INSPIRE MIG: Maintenance and Implementation Group – Policy issues
INSPIRE MIG-T: Maintenance and Implementation Group – Technical issues
INSPIRE working groups – participation is dependent on capacity and topic
INSPIRE Thematic Clusters – participation is dependent on capacity and topic
Eurogeographics Knowledge Exchange Network – INSPIRE subgroup