Speakers Bio & Abstract

Biography
M.Sc. Thorsten Reitz is founder and CEO of wetransform GmbH. From 2005 to 2012, he worked at Fraunhofer IGD?s Geospatial Information Management department. In this time, he developed the initial versions of HALE. Thorsten acquired and contributed to research projects in data harmonization, such as HUMBOLDT, plan4business and Nature-SDI. From 2012 to 2015, he worked as a Lead Product Engineer for 3D GIS at the Esri R&D Center Zurich.Abstract
Democratizing INSPIRE: INSPIRE as a ServiceIn this work, we present an in-depth analysis of contributors to costs in INSPIRE implementation and in the maintenance of INSPIRE services, and look at strategies to reduce these costs substantially. Our goal is to show what options the community has to make provision and usage of INSPIRE services accessible to all data providers and users. As a basis for the analysis, we use data from our own projects, from a survey conducted via the SMESpire project, from tendering databases and from existing publications. In the cost analysis, we look at the components that lead to the total ?system unit cost?. One such components is the service type and usage, a second one is the license type. We also include a comparison of different service types and their operational requirements, factoring in INSPIRE requirements on availability and capacity. We furthermore look at typical costs for custom integration of INSPIRE services with existing infrastructure. Finally, we investigate the costs of maintenance and of keeping up to date with new INSPIRE or other standards? versions. The section on cost reductions is based on the main cost drivers identified previously and highlights options to reduce costs, while increasing value of INSPIRE services. We present scenarios where INSPIRE as a Service systems are shared by multiple organisations - by tens, by hundreds, and by thousands - to reduce both service provision unit costs and costs associated with using INSPIRE services.