54 All the actors of the water domain in France organized on a common protocol since 1993, have adopted in 2005 common rules to improve the access to water data. The application of these rules will progressively lead to a more efficient data dissemination process. One example is the geoportal of the Sandre http://sandre.eaufrance.fr/. Since 1993, a community on the water domain in France has been organizing the access to water data. Covering marine water, groundwater and surface water, all partners have agreed on a common protocol. One of the main goal is to achieve to communicate between partners using a common language for water named "Sandre". First design on a common semantic (codification, data models, dictionnaries, ...), the Water Information System for France has extended this interoperability to technical issues (protocols, webservices, ...). In 2005 was published the guideline for the Water Information System for France architecture taking into account all on-going initiatives at EU level like WISE or INSPIRE and at international level like OGC, W3C, OASIS, ... On this step by step approach, progress to access to the data on a distributed way will be improved based on existing system, adoption of a SOA, promoting use of opensource software, delivering free public access to water data in France in a consistent way. Following 2 years of prototyping and analysis of systems, different projects are implementing these rules today. One example is the geoportal for water data of the Sandre. This webmapping application is using Mapserver/Cartoweb and only webservices to display, query and export data to provide access to water data references (river network, monitoring stations, infrastructures, ...). The interface use WMS and WFS services to connect to the data publish by producers. The long term objectivs is to avoid the manual data collection process. FOSS4G2006 - Free And Open Source Software for Geoinformatics Sesion 1 : SDI-USE Francois Prunayre fx.prunayre@oieau.fr Pierre Lagarde p.lagarde@oieau.fr Michael Treguer mickael.treguer@ifremer.fr Francois Prunayre fx.prunayre@oieau.fr <MaKaC.conference.ContributionType object at 0xb483a0ec> SDI-USE