Establishment of spatial data infrastructure within the environmental sector in Slovak Republic

Life quality improvement depends as on our willingness for development as on accessibility of relevant and high quality information influencing on our decisions. Spatial information can play a special role in this improvement process because it allows information to be integrated from a variety of disciplines for a various usage. Within the environmental sector of Slovakia we can recognise high demand for usage and access dissemination of spatial information. On the other hand we are still facing to problems connected with incompatibility, low accessibility, spatial data gaps, duplicity collection, insufficient access to metadata, varying standards and low level of mutual coordination. Fortunately things are getting better and establishment of spatial data infrastructure (SDI) defined by INSPIRE can bring solutions for this kind of problems. Therefore the team of the Department of Informatics at the Slovak Environmental Agency (SEA) with mutual co-operation of GIS specialist from the other governmental institutions under the Ministry of the environment (MoE) of the Slovak Republic (as Geological Survey of Slovak Republic, Slovak Hydrometeorological Institute, Slovak Water Management Enterprise, State Nature Conservancy of the Slovak Republic, Water Research Institute and Slovak Caves Administration, The Slovak Museum of Nature Protection and Speleology) decided to develop distributed geographically oriented system which brings a new approach to collection, administration, dissemination and publishing of spatial information. Old way of complicated mutual exchange among heterogeneous environments and platforms and difficult access for various users is going to be replaced by new approach based on principles of interoperability, standardisation, and dissemination. 1. Philosophy and vision The main philosophy is establishing fully operable SDI within the environmental sector as an essential component of national SDI. This NSDI will represent Slovak contribution to European SDI. SDI is a framework defining the main rules for collecting, administration, processing and distribution of spatial information among wide community. This framework will have legal base and will provide sufficient information as for common citizens as for specialist and good policy support process. Practical aspect of this effort is represented by developed Central data warehouse, with regularly actualised spatial data and their metadata with the vision to transformation to distributed system. This aim depends on speed of development of data warehouses among all the other environmental organisations and their mutual network penetration. 1 Slovak environmental agency, Tajovskeho 28, 975 90 Banska Bystrica, Slovakia, email: [email protected], Internet: http://www.sazp.sk EnviroInfo 2005 (Brno) Informatics for Environmental Protection Networking Environmental Information Copyright © Masaryk University Brno, Brno 2005. ISBN: 80-210-3780-6