March 8, 2011 – INSPIRE is part of a suite of European Directives that aim to standardize and ensure access to public data across Europe. Designed to improve access to and knowledge of geographical data holdings, the INSPIRE directive requires that member states provide public access to location based data related to the environment. The latest release of GGP Systems’ desktop GIS will support that directive.

We found this piece of news on Directions Magazine in their article, “GGP GIS Improves Access to Public Sector Information.” GeoNetwork Opensource is a data catalog that uses the Internet to enable access to geo-referenced databases, cartographic products and related metadata from a variety of sources.

In addition to the ability to store complex layers of mapped information in an international standard format defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), GeoNetwork Opensource enables users to directly read from and write to spatial databases. This makes information shareable between departments and or other organizations – a positive step towards improved communications and reducing redundancy. All this was done well before the deadline of May 2011 imposed by the directive.

Having easy access to data, with positive results, is always something we can get behind.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.