Barrow Borough Council INSPIRED AGI awards panel

This years winner of the Local Public Services Award is Barrow Borough Council for implementing an open source solution for publishing spatial data under INSPIRE. The system creates an INSPIRE compliant solution for discovery and mapping services and links with data.gov.uk. The solution potentially provides a road map for many other organizations using open source technology at low cost.

INSPIRE is a legal technical framework for accessing and sharing spatial information across Europe. INPSIRE compliance is a high profile topic which many organisations have not fully embraced.  Lessons learnt and the knowledge of those involved can be shared widely amongst other public sector organisations and ensure they comply with the INSPIRE directive. 

Robin Gawlik, who implemented the project at Barrow, has provided valuable feedback from a practitioners perspective about UK Location infrastructure components to the UK Location programme. With this implementation Barrow has demonstrated that the implementation of INSPIRE publishing services is technically feasible even for small local authorities and has set a best practice example for data publishers in the country. 

It must not be underestimated the effect the success of this project could have, should it be used, for best practice and a model for implementing INSPIRE compliant services.

A case study of the project on the Implementation of an Open Source solution for INSPIRE publishing services is available from the LGA website on http://www.lga.gov.uk/lga/aio/20246680. The system can be accessed on http://www.barrowbc.gov.uk/Default.aspx?page=1629.