Easy to use, cost effective collaboration: GDI Südhessen and the InspireUmsetzer

How wetransform provided municipal data providers with an automated process for continuous INSPIRE compliance for less than €200 a year

GDI-Südhessen is a cooperative at county level, including more than 100 municipalities in the southern part of the German state of Hesse. The goal of this group is to improve internal cooperation and data sharing and to collaboratively tackle larger challenges, such as the implementation of the INSPIRE initiative.

To aid them, we built the GDI InspireUmsetzer.

Together with GDI-Südhessen, we have created an open platform with two goals in mind:

• Exchange data across all member organisations using shared data models
• Fulfil INSPIRE obligations

Particularly the latter typically requires significant capacity building, investment in software development, and changes to internal data production processes. Not to mention a large amount of expert knowledge.

The platform enables data providers without any knowledge of INSPIRE standards to upload data easily. The system then transforms the data and provides services in a fully automated workflow. The process also includes publishing in open data catalogues, along with data and metadata validation.

We did not merely build a tool that was useful for GDI, but laid the groundwork for a solution that could be offered to all organisations that needed to comply with the INSPIRE directive.