In an email published on the public geo-data mailing list, Jo Walsh has forwarded an answer of an MEP, which includes a letter of Eurogreographics, a lobbying association regrouping National Mapping Agencies. Those National Mapping Agencies are lobbying Members of the European Parliament! 

Subject: INSPIRE Directive
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 12:09:29 +0100
Thread-Topic: INSPIRE Directive
Thread-Index: AcZHVfexB2VKVA/PR3W9cuz/idiMqg==
From: "Nick Land" <nick.land at eurogeographics.org>
To: "HASSI Satu" <shassi at europarl.eu.int>

Dear Mrs Hassi

For your information I have sent the following e-mail to all members of the Greens/European Free Alliance who sit on the Environment Committee. I remain, of course, available to discuss INSPIRE with you (or your advisors) at any time, if you think this would be helpful.

Best wishes
Nick Land, Executive Director of EuroGeographics

I understand that many of you will be holding working group meetings this week in Strasbourg to discuss the INSPIRE Directive, 2nd reading EP amendments proposed by the Rapporteur, Mrs Brepoels, in advance of the Environment Committee vote on 21st March.

EuroGeographics, the association of Europe's National Mapping & Cadastral Agencies, is one of main groups of stakeholders who will be involved in the implementation of INSPIRE. Unfortunately, of the 35 amendments proposed by the Rapporteur (version dated 1.2.2006), some 20 are unacceptable when viewed from the perspective of those organisations, not only the mapping agencies, who will have to make INSPIRE work in practise. For a so called 'technical' directive, INSPIRE has become side-tracked by an ideological debate on Intellectual Property Rights and Pricing and Licensing of data when the *real* issues are of a more technical nature, such as the harmonisation of different data specifications across Europe.

I know that INSPIRE is not 'sexy', but the spatial information that it will (or should) deliver is vital to the development and implementation of Environmental policy across Europe. INSPIRE, therefore, is an important directive, but please can I ask you to think about the potential impact of what is being proposed and ask yourself whether the amendments help to reduce the barriers to greater sharing of spatial information across Europe or actually will increase them and reduce the quality of the available data?

The attached document provides a summary of what seem to be the key issues and I hope you are able to review it before your working group meetings and/or the Environment Committee vote. If you would like to discuss this further, please do not hesitate to contact me directly.

Thank you in advance for your time.

Nick Land
Executive Director of EuroGeographics

T: +33 1 64 15 32 65 (office)
T: +33 6 07 10 42 32 (mobile)

www.eurogeographics.org <http://www.eurogeographics.org/>