Armin Retterath
Chair of the German Working Group Geoservices
Coordination Centre Geodata Infrastructure Germany
Germany

Biography
Armin Retterath: Central Office SDI of the German Federal State Rhineland-Palatinate in Koblenz. Education as Naval Reserve Officer (1992-1994); Diploma in Geodesy (2000); Research assistant - Institute for Theoretical Geodesy - University Bonn (2000-2001); Second state examination (2004); Since 2005: Architect of the SDI for the German Federal State Rhineland-Palatinate and Chair of the German Working Group for Geoservices.

Abstract
Positive Effects of the INSPIRE Directive on the Evolution of Local and Regional SDIs

Since the Directive came into force in 2007, the constituted working groups put great efforts in the improvement of the standardisation within the scope of providing direct online access to spatial data. Indeed there were some basic approaches to establish SDIs in different countries of the European Union before 2007, but the underlying specifications and standards of OGC and ISO were not developed sufficiently to allow the required interoperability. The abstract standards were - depending on the use case - differently construed and thus heterogeneously applied. Only when the INSPIRE Service Framework was developed, it was possible to exchange spatial data across countries in a reasonable way. Without this european initiative and its associated obligations all the different local and regional SDIs stand no real chance to evolve in a sustainable way. Particular the Network Services Regulation clarifies many ambiguities in the framework of the underlying OGC specifications. The INSPIRE concept for providing Download Services exceeds the preliminary point of view of other SDIs. So far the download of data was only possible either by adding a linkage to the resource into the corresponding metadata record or by providing a WFS. The lack of WFS-clients and the insufficient possibility to describe downloadable datasets in form of ISO-metadata leads to the alternative ATOM Feed based approach. This solution was straightforward and resulted in the fact, that actually most downloadable datasets in the INSPIRE-Geoportal are available via ATOM Feeds. Three Federal German States decided to use also the INSPIRE ATOM Feeds as their standard method for distributing spatial data. On the one hand this strategy allows to fulfil all the requirements of the INSPIRE Directive, on the other hand it was initially possible to give the users of their SDIs a unified and simple method to retrieve spatial datasets from distributed organisations. The presentation will show the realisation on the basis of practical examples. It shows the huge potential which maybe unlocked by consistent implementation of the INSPIRE regulations. For Rhineland-Palatinate, Saarland and Hesse INSPIRE proved itself in practise.