The 'go to' organisation for Local Government improvement in Scotland

INSPIRE aims to improve the provision of data to inform environmental policy making through establishing an infrastructure for spatial information in the European Union.

INSPIRE defines common technical standards for publishing spatial datasets such as addresses and land use. Data must be:

• Discoverable
• Viewable
• Transformed
• Downloadable

INSPIRE promotes better sharing of data but does not promote open data as many organisations have intellectual property rights and are not funded to release it under an Open Government Licence.

SIS has been creating a sustainable business model that allows them to share council data, but also to fund its standardised creation and sharing.

SIS has helped local government comply with INSPIRE:

• Created metadata records for local government datasets on the national Scottish Spatial Data Infrastructure catalogue.
• Created a web mapping service of local government datasets, and a web feature service download capability both via the Spatial Hub.
• Created various licences and terms and conditions that allow us to share the local government data with different organisations and sectors.
• Begun to collect more and more themes.
• Aims to share national local government datasets with as many organisations and sectors as possible.