Why the historic environment needs a Spatial Data infrastructure
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2016-06-19

The INSPIRE Directive (2007) mandates European Union countries to share environmentally related datasets so that they can be easily accessed by other public organisations within their own and neighbouring countries to inform policies or activities that may impact on the environment. Key to delivering INSPIRE is the establishment of Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) providing frameworks for coordinating the policies, infrastructure and standards needed to acquire, process, distribute, use, maintain and preserve spatial data through discovery, view and download services by 2020.  
Archaeological information is inherently spatial yet, despite the environmental focus of INSPIRE, guidance is limited and ambiguous for archaeological datasets and consequentially there is limited engagement from data curators. Although Protected Sites is an INSPIRE theme does it cover only those formally designated through legislation or include sites managed through legal or other effective means? 
INSPIRE publishes data to help inform environmental policies and if data is unpublished there is a risk it will simply be ignored. Complex modelling of environmental change through Ecosystem Services remotely consuming web services is already happening but the lack of published reference datasets from the historic environment compromises consideration of the resource in decision making processes.
Development of SDIs for heritage can bring wider benefits for the profession. Too often fieldwork extents and results are confined to paper publications or reside in project archives. Consequentially we lack a spatial record of fieldwork activities. Although cultural heritage data often has a strong spatial component, the full potential of the geographies created through discovery, recording and analysis is far from being realised. Harmonisation and publication of spatial data to consistent standards through an SDI is an essential pre-requisite for mainstreaming the use of heritage data in 21st century to get cultural heritage to work for Europe.

Peter McKeague (Historic Environment Scotland), Anthony Corns (The Discovery Programme), Axel Posluschny (University of Bamberg)