Administrative units

Units of administration, dividing areas where Member States have and/or exercise jurisdictional rights, for local, regional and national governance, separated by administrative boundaries.
Annex 1

Description

Each national territory is divided into administrative units. The administrative units are separated by administrative boundaries. Administrative units and administrative boundaries form a partition of space. According to user requirements it will be distinguished between land and (coastal) water parts of administrative units. The INSPIRE theme 'Administrative units' refers to the division of areas where Member States have and/or exercise jurisdictional rights, for local, regional and national governance, i.e. units at the cadastral parcel level are excluded as well as territorial waters, which are in fact assigned to the INSPIRE themes 'Cadastral parcels', 'Hydrography' (Annex I) and/or 'Sea regions' (Annex III). It does not include related systems such as census districts, post office regions and other sector-specific regions, but it will contain a reference to national statistical units at local level (LAU) and to the Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS) established by Eurostat.

Specifications

	INSPIRE Data Specification on Administrative Units – Technical Guidelines
	INSPIRE Code lists Registry entry for Administrative units The INSPIRE infrastructure involves a number of items, which require clear descriptions and the possibility to be referenced through unique identifiers. Examples for such items include INSPIRE themes, code lists, application schemas or discovery services. Registers provide a means to assign identifiers to items and their labels, definitions and descriptions (in different languages). The INSPIRE registry provides a central access point to a number of centrally managed INSPIRE registers. The content of these registers are based on the INSPIRE Directive, Implementing Rules and Technical Guidelines.
	Feature Catalogue
	Data Models: Administrative UnitsThe INSPIRE Implementing Rules on interoperability of spatial data sets and services (link is external) and the data specification guidance documents are based on the UML data models developed by the INSPIRE Thematic Working Groups. These data models are managed in a common UML repository, which also stores older revisions of the models.
	Data Models: Maritime UnitsThe INSPIRE Implementing Rules on interoperability of spatial data sets and services (link is external) and the data specification guidance documents are based on the UML data models developed by the INSPIRE Thematic Working Groups. These data models are managed in a common UML repository, which also stores older revisions of the models.
	XSD Schema: Administrative Units
	XSD Schema: Maritime Units
	Mapping Table: Administrative Units
	Mapping Table: Maritime Units

Tools

	Read/Compare Technical Guidelines The Read/Compare Data Specifications application (link is external) facilitates reading INSPIRE Data Specification – Technical Guidelines documents, allowing the reader to easily navigate through the sections of the document. In addition the application allows the reader to compare, on the same screen, selected sections of the technical guidelines for two different themes.
	Find Your Scope The application Find your scope (link is external) supports data providers with identification of the INSPIRE spatial data themes and spatial object types that are relevant to the dataset(s) they administer. This application is foreseen to be useful especially in situations when datasets fall under two or more INSPIRE data themes / application schemas content.
	Implementations The Are3na Re3ference Platform is an information system that is being developed to help those public administrations responsible for providing INSPIRE data, metadata and services to implement the Directive and for those interested in reusing the approach in other sectors to see how INSPIRE works in practice.
	[Administrative units] Data on INSPIRE Geoportal The INSPIRE geoportal provides the means to search for spatial data sets and spatial data services, and subject to access restrictions, to view spatial data sets from the EU Member States within the framework of the INSPIRE Directive.