IT Consultancy Services to the EEA and the European Commission, Directorate-General for Environment in the Areas of Dataflow Development, Management and Operation, Inspire Support and Services

Item Description:

The European Environment Agency (EEA) is planning to award the public contract resulting from the above procurement procedure. The procurement documents consist of the contract notice, the invitation letter, the draft contract and tender specifications with their respective annexes. All documents are available in the enclosed ZIP File.

Description of the services

The EEA is responsible for developing, implementing and operating approximately one hundred spatial and tabular data flows in which Member States report data to the EEA. When data have been successfully delivered to the EEA, the data are processed in various steps and eventually disseminated for further use. Services required by the Commission will be performed in close cooperation with EEA. EEA and DG ENV co-own the referred systems, though EEA is responsible for infrastructure and day-to-day operation. The dataflows and services implemented in EEA are highly automated, though continuous maintenance and support are required to ensure a smooth operation. As member of the INSPIRE Coordination Team, EEA also needs consultancy services with specific knowledge on the INSPIRE Directive and its implementation, including as well the maintenance and update of an INSPIRE-compliant metadata catalogue.

In order to ensure a long-term continuity within the EEA, the future contractor(s) will be required to organise training sessions to make EEA staff confident with the software packages, specifically FME, ArcGIS and Tableau. Depending on the needs, training sessions on other software packages, such as GeoNetwork for the creation of INSPIRE-compliant metadata and other INSPIRE-related software, should also be provided.

The EEA has established the Common Workspace (CWS) where consultants are given remote desktop access to a common IT infrastructure, including both virtual servers and software. The Common Workspace will be a fundamental element for the future contractor(s) for the performance of the framework contract(s).

Lot 1: Tabular and geospatial data processing and related support

This lot covers both consultancy services to support the Discomap infrastructure (map service platform) but also to design, implement and support the vast number of dataflows operated by EEA. EEA operates around 100 dataflows on which member states are required to report environmental data and information. Dataflows are closely operated in cooperation with the EEA thematic experts and covers air, water, emission, climate, biodiversity etc.

The processing of data is highly automated and for this purpose, several software packages are used. These include FME (Safe), ArcGIS Server/Desktop/Online (Esri), Tableau, Microsoft SQL Server, Python and C#. For certain processing of data, cloud computing (Microsoft Azure) is increasingly used, particular Azure Data Warehouse, Databricks, blob storage, Azure SQL are part of the EEA infrastructure.

Expert support is needed to develop robust and automated IT solutions which can support the complete workflow from harvesting data from ReportNet (https://www.eionet.europa.eu/reportnet), performing quality control, storage in harmonised databases (SQL and geodatabase) and dissemination of data to external users or on the EEA website.

Lot 2: Metadata cataloguing, geospatial data modelling and INSPIRE support

EEA has a long-term involvement in the INSPIRE implementation process and seeks consultancy services to continue this task. Furthermore, the EEA has its own INSPIREcompliant catalogue which is providing standard description of geospatial datasets produced or used by the EEA and its partners. Assistance in this area requires in-depth knowledge of the INSPIRE data specifications, metadata standards, geospatial data encodings and various software packages used in these activities.

As member of the INSPIRE Coordination Team, EEA is involved in the EU level coordination of this Directive, including the support to the monitoring and reporting submission processes, the maintenance and the update of the list of priority datasets for e-reporting and on the implementation of INSPIRE-compliant environmental reporting data flows.

EEA, including its ETCs, is producing and using geospatial datasets which are stored and described in an INSPIRE-compliant metadata catalogue. This catalogue is implemented using a customized version of GeoNetwork (the EEA catalogue of spatial datasets, or “SDI”) and includes a metadata editor used by EEA staff, its contractors and ETCs. Support to the maintenance of the SDI, as well as to the evolution of this catalogue towards a data warehouse including the storage of spatial and non-spatial datasets and their standard description across the EEA is required.

Download all available documents in: [ZIP]