The European Union INSPIRE geo-portal: Current state of development and lessons learned

The INSPIRE Directive (2007/2/EC of 14 March 2007) lays down the general rules aimed at the establishment of the Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community for the purposes of the Community environmental policies and the policies or activities which may have an impact on the environment. INSPIRE is based on the infrastructures for spatial information established and operated by the 27 Member States of the European Union. Whilst relying on the infrastructures of the Member States, the INSPIRE Directive also requires that “The Commission [omissis] establish and operate an INSPIRE geo-portal at Community level” (Article 15(1)) and “Member States [omissis] provide access to the services referred to in Article 11(1) through the INSPIRE geo-portal referred to in paragraph 1. Member States may also provide to those services through their own access points” (Article 15(2)). The Joint Research Centre of the European Commission is the technical responsible for the setup and operation the INSPIRE geo-portal. In line with the Directive’s requirements, the geo-portal has been opened to the public in November 2011 (http://inspire-geo-portal.ec.europa.eu). This paper describes the characteristics of the current release, allowing users to access spatial and environmental data from many different sources across Europe in one single search. The development of the geo-portal presents a number of challenges linked to the European multilingual context, the diversity and heterogeneity of the existing standards and technical choices adopted across the different Member States. Some of the solutions chosen to overcome those challenges are also presented.JRC.H.6-Digital Earth and Reference Dat

Mobile Apps to Fight the COVID-19 Crisis

The COVID-19 pandemic led to a multi-faceted global crisis, which triggered the diverse and quickly emerging use of old and new digital tools. We have developed a multi-channel approach for the monitoring and analysis of a subset of such tools, the COVID-19 related mobile applications (apps). Our approach builds on the information available in the two most prominent app stores (i.e., Google Play for Android-powered devices and Apple’s App Store for iOS-powered devices), as well as on relevant tweets and digital media outlets. The dataset presented here is one of the outcomes of this approach, uses the content of the app stores and enriches it, providing aggregated information about 837 mobile apps published across the world to fight the COVID-19 crisis. This information includes: (a) information available in the mobile app stores between 20 April 2020 and 2 August 2020; (b) complementary information obtained from manual analysis performed until mid-September 2020; and (c) status information about app availability on 28 February 2021, when we last collected data from the mobile app stores. We highlight our findings with a series of descriptives, which depict both the activities in the app stores and the qualitative information that was revealed by the manual analysis