Vanda Nunes de Lima
INSPIRE Team Member
Joint Research Centre
Italy

Biography
Vanda Nunes de Lima, Senior Expert at EC DG JRC, Graduate in Agronomy at Technical University of Lisbon, Post-graduate on Soil survey and land evaluation, specialisation on remote sensing andholds a MSc. in Spectral signatures of vegetation and land cover cartography using earth observation systems. Prior joining the EC-JRC in 1988, she was Adjunct Professor at the Instituto Superior de Agronomia, Technical University of Lisbon, participating at several national and European projects related with land evaluation, use and reclamation (e.g. CORINE Land Cover). At JRC she has 27 years of experience on geo-information, orthoimagery and earth observation applications for agriculture and environment, asproject manager of several European Unionprojects and other initiatives at European or global level (IGBP, IHDP; UN-GGIM).She was the coordinator of the INSPIRE data specifications development as the INSPIRE interoperability Implementing Rule. She is member of the EC&EEA INSPIRE Coordinating team and active in supporting theimplementation of INSPIRE, its use for cross-sector applications and its evolution to address requirements emerging from other policy areas, National, European and Global dimension.

Abstract
Where do we stand?

INSPIRE implementation, as the infrastructure for spatial information in the European Union, represents the National implementation of each Member State, after the transposition into National law, with different strategies, priorities settings and coordination structures.

The implementation have been done in several steps, following the INSPIRE roadmap.To experiment the benefits of the infrastructure, its immediate use and development of derived added value services and products are fundamental, although the benefits can only be fully harvested when implementation is, if not completed, at least very well advanced. This intrinsic difficulty can be solved with the processes that lead tosharing good initiatives, good practices and tools to use for the implementation, which are part of the Maintenance and Implementation Group (MIG) activities. It also implies the need to accelerate the implementation of INSPIRE, putting in place all measures to facilitate it.Its implementation should be planned and coordinated, not only in terms of data sets related to a theme implementation deadline, but whenever using the data sets under the scope of INSPIRE for any specific use cases.

INSPIRE impacts across sectors and across thematic communities. The main difficulty pointed out by Member States for the implementation of INSPIRE is to bring communities together. A significant part of the implementation is regarding the necessaryinter-services communication and agreements at the National level, leading to a new way of organising data and to different relations between data producers and users. This activity and transformationsare hidden when measuring the implementation status by the number of services or of the compliant data sets, but it is fundamental to make it possible.

INSPIRE plays a significant role to the realisation of the Digital Single Market (DSM), havingcross-domain andcross-border interoperabilityof data and service.Its different playersinteracting in a DSM, are leading to more business opportunities and an increased availability of knowledge and capital, in particular for SMEs, stimulating as well innovation and new opportunities.