Towards a European Policy of Geographic Information |
| I. The Importance of G.I. | |
| II. The Current Situation | A. The public sector and the private
sector B. A juxtaposition of national markets C. The absence of European data D. The need for action from the Commission |
| III. Programme of actions | A. Market knowledge B. Information on existing data C. Towards European databases D. Data policy 1. The conditions for the existence of a market E. Technological support 1. Research |
| IV. Conclusion |
These processing possibilities favoured by a development of information technologies, by an awareness of the need for better space management and the growing demand on the protection of the environment, lead to an increase in the applications of geographic information in all areas of human activity. G;I; has, in one form or another, been used for a long time for military purposes, in public works, transport or agriculture, and their use in traditional areas of activity in a digital form is considerably on the increase. Moreover, new applications are spreading into fields such as: the management of local communities, territory administration, trade, tackling risks, environmental protection etc.
In view of An Information Society, mentioned in the Bangemann report in 1994, geographic information is a universal subject present in most primary applications and also appears at the crossing of several themes, focused on in the G7 in February 1995. G;I; presents an economic challenge of vital importance in the years to come as it may enable the creation of a new industry with job opportunities by developping new applications and by the need of regularly updated data.
Moreover, G.I. is potentially an important user of information routes because it contains a large volume of data combining images, graphs and texts.
Historically, since the end of the 18th century every State adopted a national cartographic policy primarily for defensive reasons but also in order to legally define the rights of property or navigation safety. To that end, representative bodies and structures were introduced directly into the administrative system or by delegation, through the civil service. The development and diversification of usage as well as budget constraints led States to ask their producer organisations to find markets in order to finance an increasingly larger part of their expenses. New organisations created in the framework of spatial programmes, reveal the same forms of financing which make the market cover a significant part of the total cost of production.
Private producers have been gradually appearing only for the last few years together with the birth of geographic information systems and with the establishment of an industrial network including manufacturers of equipment, software companies, subcontractors and private data-producers.
Historical legacy, different legal and economic characteristics which affect, in each European country, the definition of land ownership, the contents of geographic information, legislation determining data ownership, ways of price-fixing, all lead to a very disjointed market. There is no real European market today but a juxtaposition of national markets with too few companies operating on a significant scale, across their national borders.
This situation hinders the development of competitive European companies working mainly on an international scale in the field of software and G.I.applications. While the technological know-how and innovation capacity of those firms have nothing enviable to offer to equivalent, non-member E.U.companies, their small size and capacity do not allow them to face international competion, even in most favourable circumstances. On the other hand, experience shows that, as soon as European actors were able to attain the minimum size required, their position on an international scale, becomes quite strong; for example, this was the case in the field of spatial images for civilian users.
Technical limitations and former political considerations have led each country to develop its own products independantly from its neighbours. The result is that now, apart from a generally high quality of national data, there are no uniform and coherent data covering the entire European Continent.
The first step in this direction was made by the creation of a uniform, European geodesic network in Euref, but very little data available are now included in this network. Moreover, geometric uniformity is insufficient if it does not go hand in hand with a harmonization of object and content definition.
This kind of initiative was undertaken by hydrographic organizations in the field of maritime areas. Cartographic organizations, aware of the problem, put into place appropriate measures but, more sustained effort has to be made there.
The absence of such data is a stumbling block to the development of applications enabling a global coverage of Europe such as those which will form the GISCO programme of the Commission, or those, connected with the management of surface, maritime or air transport and which are recognized as being of utmost importance in the field on an international scale.
The European Commission is an important actor on the geographic information market, in view of its own political considerations or in the context of its thematic programmes or research. Apart from forming the Community's Geographical Information System in the GISCO programme of EUROSTAT, it operates by the agency of the following actions:
The wide range of these operations reveals the importance of G.I. in European actions. It is therefore vital for the Commission to define a coherent policy to guarantee a rational use of what is available and to avoid unwanted effects of unconcerted action on the market.
Moreover, in order to allow the emergence of a true European market which would stimulate the development of companies in the sector across the borders, necessitates legal and technical harmonization. It also requires a common effort in research and development as well as education which only the Commission can coordinate to the benefit of all member States involved in the field mentioned above.
With this prospect in mind, the European Commission has the following objectives:
To coordinate actions in different DGs so as to avoid repetition of efforts and to use, to the best of their abilities, resources allocated to the sector.
To favour the emergence of applications and the creation of data sets needed as much for the Commission's action as for market development, by better coordination of work conducted by State members.
To remove legal and technical barriers towards the development of a real European Geographic Information market.
The actions to take must therefore satisfy the three preceding objectives in relying on the national policies and on the professional or scientific organisations already in place, so respecting subsidiarity. They must favour, in addition, the mobilisation of all the actors around the common objectives.
They must allow the different players to better know the European market and the national markets, the data to be produced, updated and distributed in the most satisfactory conditions, and the technological and human abilities to develop in Europe to the benefit of industrial dynamism and the creation of employment.
The gathering and distribution of information on the GI market in Europe target two goals:
It is, initially, a prerequisite for the definition of a European policy. In particular, the specification of reference databases covering all the member states will come from a better knowledge of the real needs of the users.
The creation of tools meeting the needs will be favoured by an investigation describing the structures and the volumes of the different national markets, the most important application sectors, the role of the different public or private players and the technical and financial capacities. It would encourage, by a better assessment of the commercial risks, the access of businesses to markets outside their own country.
The Commission must carry out or coordinate the realisation of such an analysis and widely distribute the information so gathered to the national administrations, businesses and the different players.
Knowledge of the available data and their conditions of use is essential to avoid unnecessary data capture and to favour the development of applications. Numerous initiatives of this type, either by local, national or European institutional bodies whose mission it is, or by the data producers themselves, or, even, by private publishers occur at a local, national or European scale.
The usefulness of the initiatives, at the European scale, is limited by the lack of standards allowing a comparison of the different sources. A special effort must be made on measuring data quality allowing a reliable assessment of the limits of their usefulness. Besides, the different services are not interconnected which prevents access from a single point to all the existing on-line services.
The action of the Commission favouring user access to information on the existing data even to the data themselves breaks down into three points:
Support for the standardisation of data description and help in the creation of services that respect these standards.
Support for research programmes devoted to the assessment of data quality and to the treatments that they undergo.
Development of the rules for the interconnection of existing services and the realisation of a one-stop point of entry.
The existence of consistent data, of a known and verified quality, regularly updated and covering the whole of the territory of the European Union, including its maritime areas, is essential for the efficient and productive administration of the Union as well as for implementing applications that are naturally across borders.
These consistent European data break down into two parts. The first is the defined reference data as the core of the common data for all applications, which serves to locate in space all the other information. The other is the thematic data for which the geographic position is defined by the core data and which are linked to a definite application or group of applications.
In the first case the essential actors are the mapping organisations, the hydrographic organisations and the suppliers of spatially referenced images. Their public service mission guarantees a consistent level of quality over the whole of their territory and the continuous update of the reference data. The MEGRIN Group for the mapping organisations, the hydrographic organisation grouped within a COST action and the suppliers of space images are already working on the creation of such layers of reference data. Their action has to be supported and improved by more active user involvement in the definition of the specification of these common data.
The thematic data are gathered with the aim of satisfying a particular applied need by groups made up of, for the most part, the government departments of the member states who, in the performance of their missions, collect and treat the data. These thematic groups would have rely on the reference data to locate their information, to use the metadata systems to see if some of those data that they require already exist and to make available the information on their own data via the network. This ideal situation is a long way from being achieved. This is why a special effort of coordination of these operations within the European programmes that gather spatially reference thematic information is indispensable and only the European Commission is in a position to do this successfully.
The creation of exploitable databases assumes the financial support of the Commission, coming as a complement to the budgets of the member states, to specify the European reference data and the required thematic data, to accelerate the collection of the raw data essential to the satisfaction of the needs (in the Community maritime areas, or for certain land areas), to stimulate the conversion of the existing analogue data into digital data and to adapt the national products to European specifications. The total of the funding coming from the Commission, from the member states and from the market has to allow the orderly creation of the layers of reference data and the thematic data and the long term maintenance of them as up-to-date data.
GI does not yet really exist as a European market. There are diverse reasons for this situation (historic, legal or cultural) but a coherent harmonisation policy can, whilst respecting subsidiarity, favour the emergence of the market by facilitating the movement and the exchange of data and by improving user participation in the definition of the commercial policy of the producer organisations.
The policy so defined has to allow the access of each person to up-to-date data that follows the defined standards under satisfactory economic conditions and which respect privacy.
Currently geographic data are in large part produced by the public sector within the context of their missions and financed jointly by the budgets of the states and the licensing of the data to users. This situation follows from the need for the states to have data for the whole of their territory allowing them to perform their missions, including data for geographic areas or of an information content that has a low commercial value. Today the relationships between the member states and their producer organisations are, depending on the case, of very different natures going from a privatisation view to a strictly government department structure.
For the proper functioning of market regulation of product specifications and selling prices of data, the producer organisations must be able to freely determine their own commercial policy for the distribution of their digital products and to find it in their interest to widely distribute the data that they create. Besides the long term funding of their activity has to be guaranteed to ensure the availability of up-to-date, quality data for the whole of the territory of the Union.
This freedom nevertheless has to be limited by rules that avoid the abuse on their part of a dominant position that a de facto monopoly situation could favour. The development of a true industry combining public and private operators for the distribution of data and the creation of value added products will, then, be favoured by such rules.
The production and maintenance of geographic data are long and expensive undertakings for which the effort must be recognised and protected. Today the national laws treat GI very differently depending on whether the law is based on creative actions or effort used.
The free flowing operation of a European market requires identical known rules that offer an efficient protection against the misappropriation of data and the unjustifiable money making which results.
It is therefore necessary to establish, in this case, a legal system for the data recognising for any person or organisation investing in the creation and maintenance of layers of geographic information a right to the protection of the investment that has been made. This derived or existing right will have to recognise the particularity of the digital products containing a description of the real world because of the considerable efforts needed for their elaboration and their continuous updating.
GI applications can have consequences with important material and human repercussions. This is the case with applications that assist decision-making in crisis situations or those linked to transport. Already the situation exists in the maritime field where the responsibility of the data supplier could be implicated in the case of a serious accident. In other situations it could be imagined that the supplier of an algorithm for the treatment and analysis of data could be implicated.
The current legislation did not foresee this type of responsibility. The absence of clarification in this field may be a considerable brake on the circulation of information and on initiative. A clarification of the obligations of each of the suppliers and of the limits of their civil and criminal responsibility is therefore an important condition for the emergence of new applications.
As GI allows the combination of any type of data with a given location it can carry some risks of infringing personal liberties and breaches of privacy. Abusive use has to be treated severely to guarantee that the Information Society is not put in place to the detriment of democracy and without the control of the citizens.
Nevertheless, prohibitive measures have to be excluded because they generate, by their existence alone, their own organised illegal systems. All of the law, harmonised at a European level, allowing the individual to check the information recorded for the individual's name or address and fixing the forbidden fields of use is the basis of a GI policy which respects democracy and the citizens without being a brake on the development of new applications or generating its own system of bypassing the law.
The development of a GI market must base itself, in complementing the data, on a dynamic, quality industry of software and services.
A policy of industrial support, in a sector for which the market targets a variety of players, not only individuals but also the government departments and businesses, has to give plenty of room to individual initiative, to the creativity of businesses and to market forces. Also, the Commission itself proposes rather to associate with and support these initiatives than to substitute them with its programmes.
The search to meet this objective justifies the recommendation the creation of a loan fund allowing the support of product proposals or new commercial actions leading to some real perspectives of financial return. Such a solution encourages technological development and access of businesses to the international market without removing their commercial responsibility.
This fund initially set at a capital sum of 6 Million ECUs and managed by procedures allowing control of its operation, will support the projects of businesses that demonstrate a real capacity to generate their own profitability on the market.
The requirement for common research programmes has already been highlighted for the measurement of data quality. But the efforts to work together must go beyond this important but limited objective. The development of new applications and of full efficiency in the use of GI requires the development of new algorithms and the solution of complex modelling problems (modelling time or transferring information between scales). The treatment methods must be consolidated and analysed with the aim of avoiding the propagation of errors.
The Commission already supports such efforts either within the 4th Community R&D Programme or through its thematic and technological programmes. These community programmes must be coordinated, evaluated and additional effort must be applied to the wide-ranging themes that are not sufficiently taken into account today by simply relying on the internationalisation of national work and the cooperation between laboratories.
The work programme will therefore have to include:
The gathering and distribution of information on the research carried out nationally by the specialised laboratories and on the content of the programmes financed by the Commission including a GI section.
The analysis of the programmes currently running, the identification of repeated activities and missing activities and the definition of the priority areas.
Support for scientific cooperation and for exchanges in the areas so defined.
The European Commission already supports the standards actions within the Technical Committee 287 of the CEN (Information Exchange) and of 278 (Transport Telematics).
If this work is the top priority and supplies the standards needed in a first phase of the putting in place of information services on the data, the subsequent effort must be based on standards for data quality and treatment and the creation of conformity certification procedures allowing the guarantee to any user of the reliability of the results obtained by their treatment processes.
These actions have to be the responsibility of the professionals themselves but the Commission can have an important role in encouraging and supporting this work.
All of the policy so defined must be accompanied by awareness and training programmes for the decision-makers and the potential technical users of GI and by supporting the creation of professional training as much in the European Union as in the third world. The field of training which has to be covered includes not only professional training but also user support, decision-maker awareness and the introduction of GI training in basic training.
The major community programmes of help in information technology training such as in the case of international cooperation have to explicitly include a GI section managed in coordination with all the other aspects of the field.
All the directions proposed demonstrate the need for coordination at three levels:
A variety of organisations grouping the actors in the field of GI have been created over time:
The International Hydrographic Organisation groups the hydrographic institutes; its European members are themselves grouped within a COST action specifically dedicated to European needs.
Remote sensing operators already have, from the initiative of the Centre for Earth Observation (CEO), put in place a joint action to encourage the development of applications.
Finally, EUROGI created in response to an impetus from DGXIII is there to represent all of the sector and associates the relevant multidisciplinary national organisations and the European associations.
The Commission action has to rely on existing structures in assuring the political direction and budget in the following way:
A Strategic Committee, with a member of the European Commission as president, made up of people at an adequate level in the involved DGs, the member states and a representative of the Executive Committee. This committee would develop the annual action plan and control its execution.
An Executive Committee working under the auspices of EUROGI at which the other organisations (CERCO, remote sensing agencies, hydrographers, thematic groups) would be invited to participate. This executive committee could see itself, under the control of the Strategic Committee, charged with responsibility for the budgets required for the proposed actions. It will be responsible for putting the annual plan into action.
This solution which relies at much as possible on the existing structures is the most flexible and the best adapted to a wide-ranging sector of activity.
The following table summarises all the actions proposed and gives a first evaluation of the required budgets.
This budget evaluation concerns the additions to be made to the existing community programmes to get the desired lever effect on the market. Also, neither the indispensable legal work, assumed to have already been taken into account in the work programme of the Legal Advisory Board of DGXIII, nor the CEO programme, nor the COST actions are included in the table.
| Actions | Total Budget MEcus | ||
| III.A | Market surveys | Annual | 1,50 |
| III.B | Information on the data | ||
| Standards | 96-97 | 0,50 | |
| Help in the creation of services | 97-98 | 1,00 | |
| One-stop shop | 97-98 | 1,00 | |
| III.C | European data | ||
| Specifications | 96-97 | 2,50 | |
| Creation at the national level | 97-99 | 7,00 | |
| Regional support for production | 97-99 | 9,00 | |
| III.D | Data policy | ||
| III.D.1 | Producer organisations | 96-99 | |
| III.D.2 | Copyright | 96-97 | |
| III.D.3 | Responsability | 96-99 | |
| III.D.4 | Privacy | 96-99 | |
| III.E | Loan fund | 96-99 | 6,00 |
| III.F.1 | Research | ||
| Data quality | 96-98 | 1,50 | |
| Encouragement of cooperation | 96-99 | 4,00 | |
| III.F.2 | Standards | ||
| Certification of data and treatments | 98-99 | 2,00 | |
| III.F.3 | Training, awareness | 96-99 | 3,00 |
| III.G | Coordination | 96-99 | 1,00 |
| Total | 40,00 |