INSPIRE is politically driven top down approach. It is important to see how INSPIRE reflects local, regional and national needs. Currently, there is low awareness on regional level and the benefits for the local level are not clearly defined. The INSPIRE architecture doesn’t reflect the needs of regions regarding data collection and updating.
There exists a large number of different voluntary or bottom-up initiatives supporting building of different parts of Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI). The SDI world is changing with development of new GPS devices, smartphones, mobile cameras and tablets. More and more localised information is collected by citizens. For such type of data collection “people as sensors” or “human sensors” terms are often used. This means that “human observations” can be part of future real-time SDIs and serve as an input for spatial decision-making processes. Current use and collection of data by citizens becomes higher than collection of data by public bodies.
INSPIRE and GMES are mainly addressed to institutional bodies and not directly to VGI (Volunteered Geographical Information). Anyway, data form sensors are included in the aims (and technical documentation) of INSPIRE, but VGI has to be organised and quality checked to enter in the "INSPIRE world".
A question to you to better understand your issue: what is your main goal for the integration of INSPIRE/GMES and VGI? Do you have concrete use cases in mind?
Yes, there are two aspects, where we are looking for experience from other teams.
1. VGI data could be useful for many public organization. For example we use voluntary information in crises situation (floods). But here are other cases like monitoring of illegal waste, etc. So question is, what could be best way, for integrating of such data. Other issue, in many countries are not available reference data like topographic maps also for public organization. So there very often is OSM used as reference layer. Unfortunately data model used in OSM is good for visualization, but it is very problematic to use it for data analysis. So question is, how transform OSM for public purposes
2. Other question is, how to make INSPIRE and GMES data better accessible for citizens, for example for users of smartphones. Seems, that WMS could be acceptable, but for example WFS is not best way, how to do it. We started build mobile catalogue for Androids, offering information about existing WMS to Android users (see http://www.habitats.cz/hs-cat and http://www.habitats.cz/about), but we are looking for experience of other teams
Are you aware of Spatialite (http://www.gaia-gis.it/gaia-sins/) and Geopaparazzi (http://code.google.com/p/geopaparazzi/)?
Here (http://jgrasstechtips.blogspot.it/2012/12/geopaparazzi-340-is-out-please-welcome.html) and here (https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/geopaparazzi-users/gvRnDhcxT64) some interesting discussion about including lightweight DB files (like Spatialite) in mobile app (like Geopaparazzi).
This is not answering to your questions about INSPIRE and GMES, but hope it might be ... inspiring :-)
Interesting applications. In any case our idea is to find Win – Win strategy connecting both Worlds. Or better three Worlds (including World of commercial data suppliers like Google or Microsoft).
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