Diomede Illuzzi
Senior Technical Manager
Planetek Italia
Italy

Abstract
INSPIRE Geoportal - Rich User Experience across Member States' Services

Co-Authors:
Nicola Lunanova, Senior Technical Specialist, Planetek Italia
Torsten Friebe, Team Manager, lat/lon GmbH

The INSPIRE Geoportal is designed to be the unique access point to global European environment geoinformation resources shared and made available by all member states within the framework of the "Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community" (INSPIRE) Directive. The main objective of this project is to provide the operational version of the INSPIRE Geoportal at European level, including integration interfaces for discovery, view and download services from member state portals and thus to foster the harmonization of member states' national geoportals implementations through the adoption of open standards and open source products. The INSPIRE Geoportal will further provide access to the services of non-member states that have taken the initiative to implement INSPIRE compliant services. This paper provides an overview of the portal's functionalities and a set of examples with the objective to explain how a user, starting from the "interactive discovery", which is a discovery tool quite specific to this European-level geoportal, is enabled to perform cross-country and cross-language searches through the entire INSPIRE ecosystem. Through iterative refinements of results and cross-border combination of datasets, he can then easily exploit the Geoportal's view and download capabilities and share findings and information of interest within the Geoportal's community. The paper, then, explains how the end-user interface already implemented in the prototype release of the Geoportal software was enhanced to ensure a thorough user experience within the INSPIRE ecosystem.