In the beautiful Montenegrin resort of Becici the project INSPIRATION organized its events from December 3 till December 6, 2012. Despite the threatening weather conditions all three events – INSPIRE Day Montenegro, 3rd Regional INSPIRE Training and the National INSPIRE Workshop – managed to draw relevant national and regional stakeholder representatives and to fulfill the set objectives. In addition to that, three meetings were held on Wednesday, December 6, in the afternoon – the Beneficiary Project Team meeting, the Management Board meeting and the Steering Committee meeting. Since the venue was the well renowned Hotel Splendid, the Real Estate Agency Montenegro, the INSPIRATION Project team and all the attendees had excellent conditions for good work.

The week started with INSPIRE Day Montenegro, where over fifty participants gathered, spanning from national ministries and agencies, through local government representatives, to universities and to specialized engineering and research organizations. The importance of the INSPIRE Day Montenegro is in raising awareness of the spatial data infrastructure and INSPIRE for the society. Geospatial information is already well established resource in any kind of policy making and making decisions in Montenegro, especially in the field of land administration – that was evident from the discussion. The next level is spatial data infrastructure, where all the relevant stakeholders join forces to build the institutional and legal framework, as well as standards and technical systems to make spatial information available to the users.

Mr. Dragan Kovacevic, Director Real Estate Directorate Montenegro, opened the INSPIRE Day Montenegro and welcomed the participants. Following that Mr. Fritz Kroiss joined in greeting the participants. Project experts presented the general introduction to INSPIRE Directive and INSPIRE services architecture and gave an introduction to project task, objectives, expected results and achievements so far. Also, the Ideas Competition was introduced with invitation to everybody interested to apply. In the block of national presentations there were presentations by Real Estate Directorate, Geological Survey Montenegro, the Montenegrin branch of BalkanGEO.net initiative, Statistics Bureau Montenegro – Monstat, Institute for Hydrometeorology and Seismology of Montenegro, Tivat municipality and Environmental Agency Montenegro. In the questions and answers session the majority of issues raised were related to the registration of formerly general societal property as the possession of either national government or of the local government.

Presentations shown during the event can be downloaded below:

3rd INSPIRE Training

Tuesday and Wednesday, December 4 – 5, 2012, were days for 3rd Regional INSPIRE Training. Following previous two trainings in Banja Luka and Zagreb, this was the final regional educational event in the frame of the Project INSPIRATION. This training in the first day covered three legal and managerial areas: Legal transposition of INSPIRE Directive, SDI Licensing, and Organizational and Business Models. In the Legal Transposition block Mr. Fritz Kroiss first introduced the policy measures of the European Union, and after that Croatian and Macedonian case of making NSDI laws, with experience and lessons learned, were presented by their national cadastral agencies who are the leading authorities in that activity in their respective countries. In the SDI Licensing block project experts gave overview of licensing under INSPIRE, Creative Commons Licenses, Open Data Initiative, Public Sector Information (PSI) Directive, and enforcement and implementation of licensing. In the third block of the day Mr. Andreas Wytzisk of con terra, also one of the project’s senior experts, presented the organizational setup of Saxony’s (Germany) SDI, and Mr. Tomaz Petek of Slovenian Surveying and Mapping Agency presented the approach of Slovenian SDI organization and setup. In the Day 2 of the training, as agreed in previous training in Zagreb, an introduction to UML was given, which is tackling with technical knowledge necessary for understanding many kinds of normative documents; taking into account that the audience is mostly legally or organizationally oriented, the content was light, but included a few exercises, e.g. designing the cadastral parcels data model on the conceptual level, using UML on the paper and pencil level, where the class was divided into several teams and each team made their own design. The final session of the training was the questions and answers session. Again the class was arranged as a few teams and each team made a list of opportunities and challenges of SDI with special emphasis on the legal aspects; the teams presented their top rated items and for those the answers were provided immediately by the project experts, while for the rest of the questions answers are to be provided later.

Presentations shown during the training can be downloaded below:

Project Team Meeting, Management Board Meeting, Steering Committee Meeting

Afternoon session of the 3rd Regional Training was dedicated to the meetings of the project bodies:
At the Project Team Meeting draft regional analysis and recommendation reports in all three activities of the project were presented by the members of the team – Mr. Kroiss, Mr. Wytzisk, Mr. Skender, Mr. Ansorge and Mr. Roth. Since that presentation was key to the continuation of the project, agreement was reached that members of the Management Board attend. The project work and the results were rated high and the satisfaction with the project was expressed by most of the discussants. The Steering Committee members from the EC and the beneficiaries also evaluated the project progress and results with satisfaction.

The fourth day of the week was reserved for the National INSPIRE Workshop. Together with the general overview of the project goals, results and approach, the NSDI/INSPIRE implementation in Montenegro was presented by the Real Estate Directorate Montenegro. Also the general introduction to spatial data infrastructures was given, as well as the presentation of INSPIRE in the European information framework and the legal transposition of INSPIRE in Austria. Presentation of assessments and recommendations of each project activity was at the end, along with the discussion of results and next steps.

Presentations shown during the workshop can be downloaded below: