New Conformance Class on conformance of network services

[MarcoMinghini]

Dear INSPIRE validation community,
we are happy to inform you that a new Conformance Class was added to the INSPIRE Reference Validator, in order to help test the declaration of conformance of network services, in their metadata.

Tha analysis of INSPIRE Monitoring and Reporting results showed several cases, where the declaration of conformity of network services (in network service metadata) was done against the wrong Regulation, typically against Regulation 1089/2010 (Implementing Rules on interoperability of spatial data sets and services) instead of the correct Regulation, which is Regulation 976/2009 (Implementing Rules for network services) - see for example this discussion.

The test simply checks that the declaration is performed against the correct Regulation. The Conformance Class was added in the Validator as Conformance Class 4b: 'INSPIRE Network Services metadata for Monitoring', and is by default executed when testing network service metadata (see figure below).

The ATS is available here, while the corresponding ETS is available here.

The Conformance Class was added to the staging instance of the INSPIRE Reference Validator for testing by the community, and will be added to the production instance with the next release in July 2025.