All organisations with an interest in or experience using unique identifiers

Your input to this questionnaire is valuable in that it will help determine and define the Implementing Rules that will complement the implementation of the INSPIRE Directive. This will ensure that your views will be considered when the Directive becomes law and the Implementing Rules Regulations to be applied to your information and data.

INSPIRE and the Implementing Rules of INSPIRE will only apply to data that you publish externally and not to internal datasets and internal data processes.

The purpose of this questionnaire is to provide the INSPIRE Data Specifications Drafting Team the current status of using unique identifiers in your organisation, and to clarify if the proposed structure and restrictions in the lexical rules for unique identifiers are feasible for INSPIRE.

The proposed measures are considered to be feasible if the national unique identifiers can be mapped in a unique identifier in INSPIRE.

Article 8 (2) of the INSPIRE Directive requires that for datasets corresponding to the themes listed in annexes I and II, the implementing rules shall address […]

(a) a common framework for the unique identification of spatial objects, to which identifiers under national systems can be mapped in order to ensure interoperability between them;"

This means all spatial objects of Annexes I and II shall carry a unique identifier property. Spatial objects are abstract representations of a real-world phenomenon related to a specific location or geographic area. Spatial objects include vector data (e.g. building, forest, railway) and coverages i.e. grids (e.g. orthophoto, DTM). "Spatial objects" in INSPIRE do not refer the entities of the real world, but their abstractions, sometimes called features. The same entity of the real world may be represented by several features (e.g. at different levels of details), each of them having their own identifier.

• For vector data, “spatial objects” to be identified are the individual features in a database, e.g. each segment of road in a transport dataset.
• For coverages, as there is no need to identify each cell, the “spatial object” to be identified is the file (the dataset).

In the INSPIRE context, “unique identifiers” mean the external identifiers, used to identify spatial objects in a specific database and supplied to the users.

• Internal identifiers (used to manage a database and not supplied to users) are out of the scope of this questionnaire.
• Thematic identifiers (which are the same for a given real-world entities in different databases, as e.g. administrative codes) are also out of the scope of this questionnaire.

The deadline for completing the questionniare is Friday, 6th July 2007 17:00 CET

It may happen that your organisation uses different systems for unique identifiers for each different product. In this case, please fill as many questionnaires as you think it is useful to give us a clear idea of your practises about and explain us at the end of the questionnaire what is the context of your answer. Please note that even incomplete answers are useful, so please do complete the questionnaire as far as you can. You can start answering the questionnaire by following the link "Start On-line consultation" at the bottom of this page.

A downloadable version of the questionnaire is available. Given the fairly technical and detailed contents of the questionnaire, we strongly advise using the download option only for the purpose of preparing your answers, before submitting your final answers online.

To submit your answers just click on the "Submit button" at the end of the on-line questionnaire.

The results of this survey will enable the drafting Team to decide if the proposed lexical rules:

• are feasible, as they are
• are feasible with some amendments
• are not feasible at all

In the two first cases, a recommendation about lexical rules for “unique identifiers” will be added to document D2.5 “Generic Conceptual model”. In the last case, no recommendation on this topic will be added.
Furthermore, an analysis of the results of this survey will be published and made available for all SDIC/LMOs.

The Commission is committed to individual's data protection. All the requested personal data are therefore collected only for the purpose of the present consultation.

You should also be aware that, pursuant to Regulation (EC)1049/2001 regarding public access to European Parliament, Council and Commission documents, requests for access to the names of respondents and the contents of their answers may be submitted by third-parties following the closure of this consultation. Personal data will only be disclosed in accordance with the legislation on data protection (Regulation (EC)45/2001).

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