Two of the priority actions for INSPIRE maintenance and implementation, the work on an update of the Metadata Technical Guidelines and on commonly agreed validation rules and tools, will be kicking off in November. The work on both actions will take place in dedicated MIG sub-groups. Experts who would like to support the work of these sub-groups should reply to the recently published calls for participation [1] [2] and/or contact their national MIG-T representatives.

The sub-group on Update of the Technical Guidelines for Metadata will address a number of issues that have been identified during the on-going implementation in the Member States, e.g.:

• A number of issues has been raised for the Metadata TG (e.g. issues concerning the metadata element useLimitation) that were not been fixed with the last update of the Metadata TG .
• The guidelines for metadata for interoperability (aka metadata for evaluation and use) are currently contained in the data specifications rather than integrated in the Metadata TG.
• The quality of the metadata harvested by the INSPIRE geoportal from the national discovery services is often quite poor, even if they are formally meeting the requirements of the metadata IRs.
• The revised versions of the ISO standards on metadata needs to be addressed to give security in planning. Many implementations are based on the existing standards. Re-building these implementations would require an enormous amount of re-investment.
• An analysis of metadata, which is created now with significant effort, should be made in order for the metadata to support additional use cases, than just the search for geodata and the allocation of information.

The main objective of the sub-group on Validation and Conformity Testing is the development commonly agreed European validation rules and tools for INSPIRE metadata, network services and data sets. The validation and conformity testing will be based mainly on the technical solutions proposed in the TGs. The sub-group shall be organised according to the following three main tasks:

• Policies and procedures
• Test development
• Software development

[1] https://ies-svn.jrc.ec.europa.eu/issues/2228 (Call for participation for the sub-group on validation and conformity testing)
[2] https://ies-svn.jrc.ec.europa.eu/issues/2229 (Call for participation for the sub-group on updating the metadata TGs)

 See the complete article at: http://inspire.ec.europa.eu/index.cfm/newsid/11609