The availability of timely, accessible and well documented data plays a central role in the process of digital transformation in our societies and businesses. Considering this, the European Commission has established an ambitious agenda that aims to leverage on the favourable technological and political context and build a society that is empowered by data-driven innovation. Within this context, geospatial data remains critically important for many businesses and public services. The process of establishing Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) in response to the legal provisions of the European Union INSPIRE Directive has a long history. While INSPIRE focuses mainly on ’unlocking’ data from the public sector, there is need to address emerging technological trends, and consider the role of other actors such as the private sector and citizen science initiatives. The objective of this paper, given those bounding conditions is twofold. Firstly, we position SDI-related developments in Europe within the broader context of the current political and technological scenery. In doing so, we pay particular attention to relevant technological developments and emerging trends that we see as enablers for the evolution of European SDIs. Secondly, we propose a high level concept of a pan-European (geo)data space with a 10-year horizon in mind. We do this by considering today’s technology while trying to adopt an evolutionary approach with developments that are incremental to contemporary SDIs.

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Access to high quality data is essential in order to better understand the environmental and health impact of noise in an increasingly urbanised world. This paper analyses how recent developments of spatial data infrastructures in Europe can significantly improve the utilization of data and streamline reporting on a pan-European scale. The Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community (INSPIRE), and Environmental Noise Directive (END) described in this manuscript provide principles for data management that, once applied, would lead to a better understanding of the state of environmental noise. Furthermore, shared, harmonised and easily discoverable environmental spatial data, required by the INSPIRE, would also support the data collection needed for the assessment and development of strategic noise maps. Action plans designed by the EU Member States to reduce noise and mitigate related effects can be shared to the public through already established nodes of the European spatial data infrastructure. Finally, data flows regarding reporting on the state of environment and END implementation to the European level can benefit by applying a decentralised e-reporting service oriented infrastructure. This would allow reported data to be maintained, frequently updated and enable pooling of information from/to other relevant and interrelated domains such as air quality, transportation, human health, population, marine environment or biodiversity. We describe those processes and provide a use case in which noise data from two neighbouring European countries are mapped to common data specifications, defined by INSPIRE, thus ensuring interoperability and harmonisation.

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Spatial data infrastructure (SDI) related to marine spatial data is known as marine SDI (MSDI). In this paper, we determine data themes under the MSDI in the order of usefulness and efficiency. The purpose is to streamline and support the prioritisation of data to be further implemented in the MSDI. This is conceptualised using the logic of decision support systems and a multi-criteria analysis approach that integrates components such as data, stakeholders, and users through multi-criteria methods for priority ranking. This research proposes an MSDI development concept and is validated using the Croatian MSDI case.

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The views expressed are purely those of the authors and may not in any circumstances be regarded as stating an official position of the European Commission.

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