The EU INSPIRE directive places a legal obligation on all public authorities, which hold geographic data about the environment, to publish this data in a specified format. The aim is to bring together this data in order to manage the environment (e.g. flooding, climate change etc.) not only at a local level, but at a European and national level too. In order to do this, INSPIRE requires data sets to meet stringent technical specifications and as such make the data interoperable at a European level.
INSPIRE does not prescribe exactly what data sets should be released, instead they provide environmental themes e.g. Energy resources, environmental monitoring facilities etc. Manchester City Council is in the process of addressing the INSPIRE Agenda and will be publishing a number of datasets under the INSPIRE themes in the future.
