INSPIRE1 is an initiative by the European Commission to create a European spatial data infrastructure2 to support EU policy. It is based on the directive 2007/2/EC of the European Parliament and of the European Council which was put into force in May 20073. As announced in December, under the banner of reducing administrative burden within the EU, the INSPIRE directive is set to be simplified.
Javier de la Torre, founder and chief strategy officer of CARTO and member of the board of directors of the OGC4, published a very interesting article on this development. The article also covers some INSPIRE history for those who are not very familiar with this European initiative:
When INSPIRE launched in 2007, it was genuinely ambitious. A legal framework to make environmental and geospatial data discoverable, accessible, and interoperable across 27 member states. Nothing like it existed in any other industry.
And that’s both its legacy and its problem. INSPIRE pushed the geospatial world to publish data in more structured and interoperable ways than almost any other sector. That was remarkable.
This is what made “geo” an easy and early supplier of data for the open data movement and OGD5 initiatives. Standards for data, metadata, and interfaces were in place.
But Javier goes on:
But [the geospatial world] did [publish data in more structured and interoperable ways than almost any other sector] before the broader analytics industry had caught up. (…) So the geospatial community built its own interoperability stack: ISO 191xx models, GML application schemas, WFS services, custom XML encodings.
This reminds me of the “capital-GEO” view of geospatial, that is, the perception of (or indeed the concrete idea to spell things) “GEOdata”, “GEOinformation”, etc., which I think is ill-advised.6
Javier continues:
INSPIRE inherited that same DNA. It became a compliance exercise built on standards that were technically sound but practically hard to implement, hard to follow, and often badly followed. In some cases, the effort to comply with INSPIRE actually made geospatial data harder to use for anyone outside the traditional GIS world.
Javier argues that while some industry stakeholders view the simplification of INSPIRE as a threat and as abandoning interoperability, it is actually an opportunity to build a more broadly useful data ecosystem:
For decades, geospatial interoperability meant creating specialized standards that only the geospatial community used. Custom schemas, custom encodings, custom services. The result was a data silo, not because of proprietary software, but because of isolated standards.
If we want spatial data to actually power AI, climate modeling, mobility optimization, biodiversity monitoring, and resilience planning, it needs to live where analytics happens. (…) That means formats the broader data industry already uses. Formats like GeoParquet. Open table standards like Apache Iceberg. API-driven access. Columnar storage. Cloud-native architectures.
These aren’t “GIS standards.” They’re analytics standards. And that’s precisely the point. The future of geospatial interoperability is not inventing new specifications for our community. It’s adopting the ones the rest of the data world already uses. That’s how you make spatial data a first-class citizen in the modern data stack, not by isolating it behind bespoke encodings that require specialized tooling to read.
Lower-case “geo”, at last.
I feel tempted to quote even more from Javier’s post; there are many more good points in it, so definitely give it a read.
Footnotes
Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community.↩︎
Spatial Data Infrastructure.↩︎
Parallels: The Swiss Federal Act on Geoinformation was put into force in July 2008. The message of the Federal Council that accompanied the draft for the Geoinformation Act (in German, in French) is dated 6 September, 2006. A short aside: Federal Council messages (“Botschaft” in German, “Message” in French) accompany draft decrees. They are regulated in Art. 141 of the Swiss Parliament Law. Their purpose is to inform the parliament about the intent and the goals behind a draft decree, the problems it aims to solve, implications for basic rights, financial and personnel impacts etc. As such, these messages often contain interesting additional information that is not contained in the draft decree itself.↩︎
Open Geospatial Consortium.↩︎
Open Government Data: The movement or policy of the public sector to publish their data openly.↩︎
I have talked about this in more detail in an (irony!) GEOSummit webinar that congealed into this blogpost. The “GEO” part is about halfway through.↩︎