Interoperability and Sharing of Biodiversity Data on a National Network in Italy

Abstract

Biodiversity protection requires to access and to process many sources of information. The Italian Ministry of Environment has entrusted ISPRA (Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research) to manage a program aimed to support interoperability and harmonization of the information stored in different data bases. Some aspects of such program, including the National Network for Biodiversity (NNB), are highlighted and commented, with reference also to other relevant initiatives. NNB has already been implemented, relying also on relevant systems as EC-CHM and EUNIS. However, the current availability of interoperability standards (as for biodiversity related themes in the Annexes of INSPIRE) require to update NNB, also taking into account the global development of the ITC architecture of the public sector.