Head Office of Geodesy and Cartography (GUGiK)

On July 8, 2026, another meeting of the Spatial Information Infrastructure Council was held at the headquarters of the Head Office of Geodesy and Cartography, chaired by its chairman, Andrzej Żylis.

The first item on the agenda was a presentation on the State Information Architecture (SIA) given by Wioletta Zwara, Deputy Director of the Department of Projects and Strategy at the Ministry of Digital Affairs. Director Zwara spoke about the principles of the SIA and what SIA governance involves, emphasizing that full implementation of the SIA requires the engagement and cooperation of the relevant public entities. She also noted that a number of challenges and barriers arise in the course of implementing the SIA, including, among others, the fragmentation of systems and processes across different administrative units, the lack of uniform technical and organizational standards across the entire public sector, and difficulties in coordinating activities between different administrative bodies and between the central and local government levels. At the end of her presentation, the representative of the Ministry of Digital Affairs outlined directions for the SIA's further development and innovation in the coming years, including extending the scope of the SIA to additional ministries and units, and the full digitalization of public services by 2030 in line with the goals of the EU's Digital Decade, which would allow citizens and businesses to handle matters online at any public office. An important message to emerge from the discussion on the SIA was confirmation that duplicate data entry will no longer be a problem going forward. Participants in the discussion included, among others, Secretary of State at the Ministry of Regional Funds and Policy Dr. Eng. Jacek Karnowski, Deputy President of Statistics Poland Dominika Rogalińska, and Deputy Chairman of the Spatial Information Infrastructure Council Professor Dariusz Gotlib of the Warsaw University of Technology. Deputy Minister Karnowski pointed, among other things, to the need to secure funding for SIA implementation in local government units.

The next topic on the agenda was the draft act amending the Act on Spatial Information Infrastructure, presented by Aneta Adamska, Head of the Geodesy and Cartography Division in the Department of Architecture and Construction at the Ministry of Development and Technology. The proposed amendments to the Act on Spatial Information Infrastructure concern:

• the rules governing the functioning of the Spatial Information Infrastructure (SII) Council, including establishing that the Surveyor General of Poland will chair the SII Council by operation of law, allowing representatives of government administration bodies at the level of director or deputy director to take part in the Council's work, and changing the scope of tasks carried out by the SII Council;
• introducing an obligation to make information gathered as part of the register of spatial data sets and services available via an application programming interface (API).

Comments submitted on the draft act as part of the inter-ministerial consultation process and public consultations are currently being reviewed.

The final item on the agenda was a presentation by Ewa Surma, Director of the Department of Strategy and International Cooperation at the Head Office of Geodesy and Cartography, on the current state of work underway at the European Commission regarding changes to the INSPIRE Directive:

• as part of the work of the Council of the EU, consensus has been reached on: maintaining the metadata-related obligations, preserving the principles of minimal interoperability, retaining the basic access functionalities (search, view, download), and keeping the provision on data exchange between public authorities;
• work on amendments is ongoing with the involvement of the various political groups in the European Parliament, and is expected to continue until September 2026. A vote in the European Parliament is scheduled for October of this year;
• the existing INSPIRE Geoportal solution was decommissioned as of July 1, 2026, with its content fully integrated into data.europa.eu as the sole EU access point;
• the provisional timeline envisages implementation of the changes to the INSPIRE Directive in the member states by the end of Q2 2029 (assuming a 24-month transposition period).

The next Council meeting is scheduled for September 2026.