SPATIAL DATA INFRASTRUCTURE IN THE GALICIA REGION: AN INSTANTIATION OF THE INSPIRE FRAMEWORK

Public administrations have been facing problems with geographical information use and management for years: difficult software interoperability, incompatible data formats and little knowledge about the available geodata are among the most common ones. This was the case of the Galicia Department of Environment, in charge of managing environmental resources in that NUTS-2 region. INSPIRE work in progress toward a European Spatial Data Infrastructure (ESDI), currently focused on environmental issues, led to a solution based on this European Commission initiative recommendations on architecture and standards. This paper will show that this solution has proven to be both adequate to solve this department's needs, and able to establish itself as the core of a future Galician SDI. This successful example may be a pattern to be followed by other regional governments.