The EU Directive INSPIRE (2007/2/EC) came into force on 15. May 2007 with the aim to create an Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe to provide a legislative framework that will enhance the accessibility of environmentally relevant data for EC politicians, economists, scientists and citizens. Optimally this data should be consistent and comparable, i.e. they should be interoperable and if possible even harmonized.

 

INSPIRE addresses 34 thematic geospatial data fields in Annex I, II and III of the Directive, and their metadata; To enable the cross-border interoperability of this data, Data Specification are being set up for each of these themes, - one being “Geology”   The work of the Work Package 3 Data Specification team has already been recognized by the European Commission as providing a basis for the necessary, more detailed specification of the INSPIRE geology theme.

 

Work Package 3 (WP 3) is delivering an essential basis for the OneGeology-Europe project: A specification for geological spatial data and an interoperable 1:1 million scale dataset for the whole of Europe. This includes in its core a vocabulary to describe lithology, age and genesis of the rocks and the tectonic structures and term definitions and relations.

 

Based on the specification it will identify the generic and specific geometric and semantic harmonisation issues. WP 3 will then “rework” these existing national datasets to make significant progress towards a harmonised dataset – a crucial step towards INSPIRE goals. The standards, architecture and framework developed here can then be “upscaled” to more detailed levels and progressively deployed for higher resolution geological data.

 

Thus, this work of the OneGeology-Europe Data Specification can provide a solid base for the description of geology of each EC country in future.