The European Commission is transitioning the INSPIRE infrastructure to EU horizontal services to ensure long-term continuity and efficiency

Europe’s geospatial data infrastructure is evolving. As key INSPIRE components move to central EU services, the transition will enhance long-term sustainability and resilience, rationalizing resources while maintaining service continuity and improving efficiency, minimizing disruption for stakeholders.

The European Commission would like to inform the INSPIRE community about the transition of key infrastructure components to central EU services. This evolution is part of a broader rationalization and streamlining effort aimed at ensuring the long-term sustainability, resilience, and effectiveness of the data infrastructure ecosystem. The transition aligns geospatial data management more closely with the EU's broader data framework. While the underlying technical infrastructure will evolve, the objective is to ensure continuity of operations and minimize disruption for users and data providers.

What is changing?

• INSPIRE Geoportal: By 1 July 2026, the INSPIRE Geoportal will be decommissioned. The European Data Portal (data.europa.eu) will become the European entry point for geospatial datasets.
• INSPIRE Registry: By 1 July 2026, the content of the INSPIRE registry will be migrated to EU Vocabularies, ensuring continued access to controlled vocabularies, code lists and other semantic assets.
• INSPIRE Validator: As of 1 April 2026, the central instance of the INSPIRE Reference Validator has been discontinued. The validator remains available as open-source software, enabling continued community-driven maintenance, national deployments and future extensions.

Ensuring continuity for users

The European Commission remains fully committed to maintaining continuity throughout the transition process. 

• Existing INSPIRE artefacts, including application schemas, identifiers, vocabularies and related resources, will remain available. 
• Existing metadata and catalogue services will be integrated into the European Data Portal ecosystem through GeoDCAT-AP. 
• Identification of good practices will continue as key driver of a modernized geospatial data sharing governance process. 
• The INSPIRE helpdesk support will remain available at least available until the end of 2026.

INSPIRE Knowledge Base

The INSPIRE Knowledge Base and website are accessible at least until the end of 2026. During this period, the platform will continue to provide documentation, guidance and support material while gradually reflecting the updated governance arrangements.

Working together

The transition is being carried out in close cooperation with Member State partners and other stakeholders across the INSPIRE community. The Commission's objective is to ensure a stable, predictable and transparent transition process that preserves existing investments while positioning INSPIRE within a modern, sustainable and interoperable European data ecosystem.