EU-funded Twinning project to support the Agency for Land Relations and Cadastre of the Republic of Moldova – activities in progress

Throughout March to May 2021 the Twinning project ”Improving spatial data services in the Republic of Moldova following EU standards” implemented a series of activities in accordance with the approved Rolling Work Plan and conducted its 3^rd Project Steering Committee meeting.

Within the 1st Component, Sustainable NSDI Governance established, the work focused on the support to the Agency for Land Relations and Cadastre (ALRC) in developing the national spatial data infrastructure (NSDI) strategical framework and raising the awareness and understanding of the public entities responsible for NSDI on the issues of management and interoperability of spatial data and services:

• The draft State Programme in the field of NSDI and the associated Action Plan were further developed, in the part related to the general and specific objectives as well as performance indicators. Both documents will be further completed, in compliance with the requirements of Government Decision 386/2020 on planning, development, approval, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of public policy documents;
• A series of online meetings were organized with 20 public entities responsible for NSDI, aiming to identify the technical, financial and human resource capacities of these institutions in the process of their spatial data management. Additionally, the meetings served as opportunities to raise the specialists’ awareness about the concept of interoperability of spatial data and services.

In the scope of the 3rd Component, Use of the existing data within the NSDI enabled, relevant activities included:

• Finalising and presenting the Guidelines on geo-referencing to ALRC and NSDI stakeholders, by detailing the entire workflow, comparing the equipment/software existing on the market and making the cost analysis, based on Croatian experience;
• Initiating the activity to draft the Guidelines on data specifications based on INSPIRE Directive and associated ISO standards;
• Initiating the activity to draft Guidelines for data modelling.

Following the intensive training programme and materials preparation an extensive 35-hour training course on the topic ”Introduction to Spatial Data Infrastructure and QGIS*” was conducted online.

In total, four groups with a total number of 102 participants benefited from this training course during 12-23 April and 17-28 May, 2021, having as the target-group the GIS (geographic information system) specialists from central public authorities and Chisinau City Hall.  

At the third meeting of the project Steering Committee organized on 21 April 2021, the participants unanimously approved the second interim quarterly report and the rolling work plan for the upcoming period.

*Note: QGIS is a professional GIS application that is built on top of and proud to be itself Free and Open Source Software.