Snowflake Software launches INSPIRE Testing Services

8th July 2011 - Snowflake Software, a participating organisation in the Annex II & III data specification testing, announced its support for testing at the INSPIRE Conference in Edinburgh.

Taking a multifaceted approach, Snowflake aims to support participants in Annex II & III testing with their ‘You do it; we do it; we do it together’ philosophy, with an emphasis on supporting organisations through the testing process in a way that best suits their needs. Testing runs for four months from 20 June to 21 October 2011.

The new service complements Snowflake’s existing ‘INSPIRE as a Service’ model and offers a number of options for organisations to transform their data into INSPIRE compliant data:

• You do it – Participants can make use of a free, fully extended GO Publisher licence to carry out their     own data specification testing;
• We do it – Snowflake will perform the data transformations on behalf of the participating organisation;
• We do it together – Participants can attend a testing workshop which includes practical sessions to perform the data specification testing and required transformations.

Ian Painter, Managing Director of Snowflake Software comments:

“In terms of implementation, Annex II and Annex III really widens the reach of INSPIRE. Where in Annex I the majority of the data can be sourced from National Mapping Agencies and larger government departments, data in Annex II and Annex III impacts pretty much all government inclusive of local, provincial and central; from big departments to small teams; from data in enterprise databases to data in spreadsheets.”

He adds:

“In my view, this poses a real challenge for INSPIRE from both a budgetary and technical point of view.  To address this, Snowflake launched its 'You do it, we do it, we do it together' campaign to cover the Annex II & III testing and a wider bureau service for Annex I implementation.”

Snowflake Software is well placed to support organisations with data testing having been actively involved with the Annex I data specification testing and with Debbie Wilson (Snowflake Software INSPIRE Domain expert) being an INSPIRE Editor on the Annex III Area Management theme.

Participating organisations looking for support with Annex II & III testing should contact Snowflake Software on 0044 (0) 23 8023 8232 or info@snowflakesoftware.com.

More information can be found on the website: www.snowflakesoftware.com/inspiretesting/