Introductory text

THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION,

Having regard to the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union,

Having regard to Directive 2007/2/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 March 2007 establishing an Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community (INSPIRE)^f1, and in particular Article 21(4) thereof,

Whereas:

Directive 2007/2/EC requires Member States to monitor the implementation and use of their infrastructures for spatial information and to report on a number of issues relating to this. Commission Decision 2009/442/EC^f2 implements Directive 2007/2/EC as regards that monitoring and reporting. Experience from the previous reporting exercises and the conclusions of recent evaluations (REFIT evaluation of Directive 2007/2/EC^f3, Fitness Check on reporting and monitoring of EU environment policy^f4) have shown the need to simplify and streamline monitoring and reporting, support better comparison of the implementation progress across Member States and allow for National and EU-wide overviews while reducing administrative monitoring and reporting burden. Updated information should be collected in an easier, comparable and less burdensome way for all reporting actors. Moreover, the significant number of indicators was not allowing for a clear insight into the implementation progress. There were too many indicators and not necessarily the right ones. Decision 2009/442/EC should therefore be replaced.

Monitoring should be based on a set of indicators calculated on the basis of data collected from public authorities. These indicators will measure the implementation progress of Directive 2007/2/EC in the Member States and will be used to evaluate the success of the Directive against its objectives. Therefore, the indicators laid down in this act have been chosen according to the generic intervention logic of Directive 2007/2/EC and address the requirements to identify the spatial data needed (Article 3), to document the identified spatial data through metadata (Article 4), to ensure that the documented spatial data is accessible online through network services allowing its discovery, view and download (Articles 6 and 7), and to organise the spatial data in interoperable data models with a common vocabulary (Article 5).

To minimize the administrative burden of monitoring, the indicators should be calculated based on the metadata for spatial data sets and spatial data services already created and published by Member States pursuant to Article 5 of Directive 2007/2/EC in order for the Member States not to be obliged to calculate the indicators manually and provide a list of the spatial data sets and spatial data services corresponding to the themes listed in Annexes I, II and III to Directive 2007/2/EC every year as provided for in in Decision 2009/442/EC. Only metadata that are published by Member States will be taken into account when calculating the indicators for monitoring. Metadata that have not been published are not discoverable and do not contribute to the infrastructure for spatial information, hence will be ommitted when calculating the indicators for monitoring.

To minimize the administrative burden of reporting, Member States should only report on those aspects of their spatial information infrastructure that have changed since the submission of the last report pursuant to Article 21(3) of Directive 2007/2/EC.

To ensure a consistent and comparable approach to the monitoring and reporting across the Union, Member States should monitor at least a common subset of spatial data sets and report on their availability, accessibility and interoperability. This common subset should be the spatial data sets already used by the Member States for the purpose of reporting under those pieces of EU environmental legislation identified in the Commission Report^f5‘Actions to Streamline Environmental Reporting’ following a comprehensive Fitness Check of reporting and monitoring of EU environment policy^f6.

The measures provided for in this Decision are in accordance with the opinion of the Committee established by Article 22 of Directive 2007/2/EC,

HAS ADOPTED THIS DECISION: