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Geoinformatics-8-2009
interview an interview with nick land (esri) gis, cadastre and land registration nick land is business development manager cadastre and national mapping agencies at esri europe. before he joined esri, he worked for eurogeographics, the association for national mapping and cadastral agencies in europe, formed in 2001. in this interview mr. land explains how esri is currently involved in inspire. also, the company s role in cadastral issues in europe is explained. where is europe, cadastre-wise? and how does europe hold up cadastre-wise compared to the us? how are new european countries doing cadastre-wise, and is there an esri vision on cadastre? by eric van rees esri recently announced it would be taking a more active role in inspire. can you tell me about esri s current involvement in inspire? and what is the role for a software vendor in inspire? nick land: esri is very actively involved in inspire. we have registered as a spatial data interest community (sdic) and this enables us to support the development and testing of the implementing rules, such as the development of specifications for network services and for data specifications. that s our direct involvement in the formal process of inspire. as a gis software provider, what we re doing is making sure that the existing products and future releases comply with the constantly evolving inspire requirements and thus ease compliance for our users. the other way in which we re involved in inspire is directly through project implementations. we have a project running at the moment called inspire@ec, which essentially is a project to help the european commission build its own internal spatial data infrastructure, compliant with the requirements of inspire. then we ve got several implementations in different countries around europe, mainly focused on but not limited to the development of national geoportals. we ve had successful projects recently in lithuania, in croatia, and we ve just upgraded the geoportal in portugal. so, in summary, we re involved with national and sub-national inspire compliant sdi implementations, supporting the european commission with their sdi, and supporting the development of the inspire implementing rules. i think those are the three different ways we re involved in inspire at the moment. ferent levels of development. i wouldn t really like to say one country is way ahead of the other, but different countries take different approaches, some more or less tied to the legal process. i think that any country that has had a programme, strategy and funding for its national sdi is moving quite quickly. you see that in a number of western european countries for example. in central and eastern europe some countries are applying for structural funds and using these to get a budget and implement projects. lithuania is a good example of where they ve got structural funding and used it successfully to build their sdi. on a related note, but looking beyond europe, esri with its business partners is directly supporting several projects in the developing nations to build their cadastre and sdi and in some cases using more innovative sources of funding such as microfinance, for example in ghana for their land registration system. nick land do you see any role for you as a software company in helping certain countries who may be behind schedule? nl: they are all at different stages of development. i think a lot of member states are already behind schedule in terms of transposing the inspire directive into national law which was supposed to have been completed by may 2009, but many countries are not there yet. as a gis software company we cannot really change or speed up the legal processes. however, we can and are helping countries with the development and implementation of their sdis, and ensuring, to the extent this is possible as the implementing rules evolve, that they are compliant with inspire. if you look across europe countries are at dif- what do you think of gi market players complaining about how much time it takes to build a national sdi? nl: i think there s no question that one of the challenges is aligning inspire as a legal process with market forces and technology developments which move much quicker. but we also have to recognize that building sdis is complex. our focus depends on our definition here, since it s a lot more than just building a geoportal where people can go and find data. there s a lot happening behind that in terms of data being produced and maintained, adoption of standards, and data sharing policies. it s a kind of step by step process, i would say. december 2009 46
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