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

Life quality improvement depends on our willingness to develop and on the accessibility of relevant and high quality information influencing our decisions. Spatial information plays an important role in this improvement process, because it allows information to be integrated from a variety of disciplines for various uses and users. Within the environmental sector of Slovakia we see that there is a great demand for the use of and access to spatial information. On the other hand, we are still facing problems connected with incompatibility, low accessibility, data gaps, duplicity of collection, insufficient access to metadata, varying standards and a low level of coordination. Fortunately things are getting better and the establishment of the spatial data infrastructure (SDI) defined by INSPIRE can bring solutions for these kind of problems. Therefore the team of the Department of Informatics at the Slovak Environmental Agency (SEA) with mutual cooperation of GIS specialists from other governmental institutions managed under the Ministry of the Environment (MoE) of the Slovak Republic (namely the Geological Survey of the Slovak Republic, the Slovak Hydrometeorological Institute, the Slovak Water Management Enterprise, the State Nature Conservancy of the Slovak Republic, the Water Research Institute and the Slovak Caves Administration, the Slovak Museum of Nature Protection and Speleology) decided to develop a distributed geographically oriented system, which brings a new approach to the collection, administration, dissemination and publishing of spatial information. The old way of complicated mutual exchange among heterogeneous environments and platforms and difficult access for various users was going to be replaced by a new approach based on the principle of interoperability and standards.