In line with the monitoring and reporting requirements of the INSPIRE Directive the Department for Environment Food & Rural Affairs has recently submitted the UK’s annual INSPIRE Monitoring Indicators Report to the Commission. The 2014 report (http://data.gov.uk/dataset/uk-2013-inspire-monitoring-indicators-report) covers the calendar year 2013 so is particularly significant as it shows the progress the UK has made in meeting the December 2013 deadline by when all existing data in scope of INSPIRE should have been published through view and download services and made discoverable via data.gov.uk.
As you can see from the table below the figures in all areas have increased showing a significant increase in the amount of INSPIRE data published and we would like to take this opportunity to thank all INSPIRE data publishers for their efforts.
| 2012 | 2013 | |
| Number of annex I Datasets | 253 | 633 |
| Number of annex II Datasets | 369 | 466 |
| Number of annex III Datasets | 431 | 1511 |
| Number View Services | 92 | 274 |
| Number of Download Services | 21 | 58 |
More work to do…
However we don’t think these figures paint the full picture. The Monitoring Indicators Report is produced from the metadata published to data.gov.uk. In producing the report we have identified a number of common issues with the metadata published on the site.
Correcting these issues would enable us to provide a much better report to the Commission but much more importantly will provide a better experience for those looking for and using government data. The common issues are:
- Missing service metadata: We know there are more than 274 view and 58 download services but could not report on these because they did not have metadata records. INSPIRE and the UK Location Information Infrastructure requires both datasets and services to have metadata records.
- Linking Services to datasets and vice versa: Metadata for services should be linked to metadata for datasets and vice versa, via the resource locator and couple resource elements (our guidance explains this).
- Missing/wrong GEMET keywords: We think more of the location metadata may have been in scope of INSPIRE but without correct keyword tags we couldn’t tell - INSPIRE records should have an INSPIRE Theme as the first keyword.
Publishing data is a commitment and we ask INSPIRE data publishers to consider these issues as part of their continuous improvement process and to make any changes to their procedures as soon as possible. The UK Location DMS Operational Guidance: http://data.gov.uk/library/uk-location-discovery-metadata-service-operational-guide provides further guidance.
The UK INSPIRE Helpdesk can be contacted via uk-inspire-help@defra.gsi.gov.uk.
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