ESDIN Reference Group meeting 12th Feb 2009

My colleague Eddie and I went along to the first meeting of the ESDIN Reference Group at IGN France in Paris.  We wanted to see how the group works and how we could get involved in order to share our experience and provide some practical help.

The ESDIN project will define best practice for member states to prepare for the INSPIRE directive. Being legislation, the directive is very specific: any public body that publishes (i.e. shares) externally any of the themes specified in Annex I - III, will be expected to comply. With this in mind, the focus at the ESDIN meeting was all about the Annex I themes and to put into practice the theory of an integrated reference data set from National Spatial Data Infrastructures (NSDI's). Easy really, just put into practice what you preach I think someone said!

To articulate this best practice, ESDIN has been divided into 12 work packages each with a leader and each with a theme. You can play an activate role "expert Reference Group" or as an observer in the "Observer Reference Group" . Eddie being the technical expert went for the forma and I being slightly more commercial, went for the later!

WP1,2, 3 &4 are about policy and management etc but from then on, technical input is required and we believe Snowflake has a pivotal role to play. In particular WP7 which about Large scale data, WP8 Quality guidelines and WP10 and WP11, Business Process and Interoperability Services. ESDIN is all about defining best practice for INSPIRE and in this regard Snowflake is already a long way down the line.  3 years ago we began developing GO Publisher with idea of data sharing through publishing to a common schema. To date GO Publisher's ability to achieve this from any relational database model is unrivalled in the marketplace. All this adds up to GO Publisher being the ideal solution for creating INSPIRE compliant data. What's more its a proven solution - as we've already been doing this for 3 years!

My overall impression of this meeting was "an excellent start" with some very good people involved and some excellent software providers and consultants committed to make INSPIRE happen.

We're certain that Snowflake has the products and expertise needed for producing INSPIRE compliant data in no time at all. There's plenty of organisations using our software for INSPIRE testing so why not join them an take an eval  to see just how easy creating INSPIRE compliant data can be.