20.10.2009 Official Journal of the European Union L 274/9 COMMISSION REGULATION (EC) No 976/2009 of 19 October 2009 implementing Directive 2007/2/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council as regards the Network Services THE COMMISSION OF THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITIES, Having regard to the Treaty establishing the European Community, Having regard to Directive 2007/2/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 March 2007 establishing an Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community (INSPIRE) ('), and in particular Article 16 thereof, Whereas: (1)  Directive 2007/2[EC lays down general rules for the establishment of the Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community. Member States are required to establish and operate a network of services for the spatial data sets and services for which metadata have been created in accordance with that Directive. 2)  In order to ensure the compatibility and usability of such services on the Community level, it is necessary to lay down the technical specifications and minimum performance criteria for those services with regard to the themes listed in Annexes [, II and III to Directive 2007/2/EC. (3)  In order to ensure that public authorities and the third parties are given the technical possibility to link their spatial data sets and services to the Network Services, it is necessary to lay down the appropriate requirements for those services. (4)  The measures provided for in this Regulation are in accordance with the opinion of the Committee estab- lished by Article 22 of Directive 2007/2[EC, HAS ADOPTED THIS REGULATION: Atticle 1 Subject matter This Regulation sets out the requirements for the establishment and maintenance of the Network Services provided for in Article 11(1) of Directive 2007/2[EC (hereinafter ‘the Network Services’) and obligations related to the availability of those services to the public authorities of the Member States and third parties pursuant to Article 12 of that Directive. () O] L 108, 25.4.2007, p. 1. Article 2 Definitions For the purposes of this Regulation, the definitions set out in Part A of the Annex to Commission Regulation (EC) No 1205/2008 (%) shall apply. The following definitions shall also apply: 1. ‘initial operating capability’ means the ability of a Network Service to provide full functionality without guaranteeing quality of service in conformity with the rules set out in Annex I to this Regulation or access to the service for all users through the INSPIRE geo-portal; 2. ‘performance’ means the minimal level by which an objective is considered to be attained representing the fact how fast a request can be completed within an INSPIRE Network Service; 3. ‘capacity means limit of the number of simultaneous service requests provided with guaranteed performance; 4. ‘availability’ means probability that the Network Service is available; 5. ‘response time’ means the time measured at the Member State service location, in which the service operation returned the first byte of the result; 6. ‘service request’ means a single request to a single operation of an INSPIRE Network Service; 7. ‘INSPIRE metadata element’ means a metadata element set out in Part B of the Annex to Regulation (EC) No 1205/2008; 8. ‘publish’ means the operation to insert, delete or update INSPIRE metadata elements of resources in the Discovery Service 9. ‘natural language’ means a language that is spoken, written, or signed by humans for general-purpose communication; 10. ‘collect’ means an operation to pull INSPIRE metadata elements of resources from a source Discovery Service and to allow to create, delete or update the metadata of these resources in the target Discovery Service; 11. ‘layer’ means a basic unit of geographic information that may be requested as a map from a server in accordance with EN ISO 19128. () O] L 326, 4.12.2008, p. 12.