According to INSPIRE each Member State must provide at least one endpoint for the discovery of national metadata.
To date, the majority of Member States (23 out of 28) met this requirement by registering its national endpoint in the INSPIRE geo-portal :
http://inspire-geoportal.ec.europa.eu/INSPIRERegistry/
In particular it's worth noting that some Member States have recorded more than one endpoint, e.g. Austria, Belgium and Latvia : it is also possible to register multiple national endpoints.
In spite of this, Italy has not yet registered its endpoint for the discovery service.
In order to get this registration, a simple communication ( e-mail ) of the INSPIRE National Contact Point addressed to the JRC ( michael.lutz@jrc.ec.europa.eu) is needed.
Why the CSW service exposed by the RNDT has not yet been registered as one of the Italian endpoints?
From the regulatory point of view , both the transposition of the INSPIRE Directive (Legislative Decree 32/2010 ) and the Codice dell'Amministrazione Digitale report that RNDT is the national reference in this context :
"The national repertoire of spatial data, [... ] is the national catalog of metadata for spatial data sets" (Legislative Decree 32/2010 , Article 5) (1)
From the technical and operational point of view, otherwise, the tests carried out in July 2013 and January 2014 by the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission ( upon request of the Agenzia per l'Italia Digitale) have shown that the CSW service and almost all of the metadata harvested are fully compliant to the provisions of Regulations 1205/2008 (2) (metadata) and 976/2009 (3) (network services) of the European Commission, as well as the related Technical Guidelines ( 1.2 of 2010 (4) for metadata , and 3.1 of 2011 (5) for discovery services) .
Notably the test performed in January 2014 reported 4412 metadata "passed" and 412 "passed with warnings " out of a total of 5540 " harvested "metadata (the total available metadata in the RNDT are 6143) .
The level of compliance to INSPIRE is almost complete for the metadata related to data (4415 of 4462) (6) .
This is an important result and it is noteworthy better than the results obtained by other Member States.
The full report is available at this address :
We emphasize that it is important that the registration of the service is done as soon as possible because :
1) the availability of Italian metadata in the European catalog is needed to give visibility to the spatial information existing in Italy , in order to
i. support national and EU environmental policies;
ii. improve knowledge of and encourage investment in our country;
2) the initial availability of metadata can trigger a virtuous cycle by pushing government entities at every level to provide new metadata to RNDT, to promote their activities at the international level;
3) to encourage the creation of innovative services by professionals, consultants and local SMEs, based on the availability of data, to the benefit of local authorities;
4) to instantiate the role of the Italian " node " within the European network ;
5) to give visibility and recognition to people who, at different scales, have actively worked for the implementation of infrastructures and services .
On the basis of the aforementioned considerations, we urge the INSPIRE National Contact Point to provide as soon as possible the URL of the RNDT CSW, in order to have the first italian endpoint registered in INSPIRE.