GIS Planet98 ­ EUROPEAN DAY

Table of Contents

• The CEC political role
• EC as a market stimulator
• EUROGI session
• EC as an actor of the market

• The need for a Commission's data policy
• GI2000 and EGII
• GI in 5FP

Introduction: why a European Day at the GIS Planet98 conference?

• the trends on GI-related political issues, GI in the Information Society, progress on the GI2000 draft Communication and the strategic view of GI/GIS research and technology development for Europe;

• the key issues of the 5^th Framework Programme for research and development, with emphasis on GI in the Information Society Technologies (IST) thematic programme;

• the GI-related needs of various services of the Commission which have to plan, implement and manage European policies.

The EUROGI Geodata for All in Europe workshop session was jointly organised to launch a debate with the GI community, to try to identify what are the specific European needs for GI and GIS.

In addition, the various services of the Commission dealing with GI want to send a common message about the European Day. This includes the internal co-ordination mechanisms, their needs for a European Geographic Information Infrastructure (EGII) and to present the European perspective of EGII, which aims to complement and build on Member State policies.

Summary of the presentations

The CEC political role: GI in the Information Society (IS)

Current Information Society policy assigns a major role to the private sector, which will lead the development of infrastructure, applications and content. The EU role is to create a favourable environment, enabling sustainable development of the market, developing a vision and catalysing the transformation from an industrial society to an Information Society.

The mission of DG XIII is to contribute to the emergence of the Information Society by stimulating a competitive multimedia content industry, facilitating access to and exploitation of European content resources and building on Europe's culture and linguistic diversity.

EU multimedia initiatives:

Some past and present EU multimedia initiatives are shown in the diagram below.

The European GI market:

The European GI market offers huge potential for growth and employment creation, but reaching a sustainable level of development requires first that certain impediments are overcome. There is a need for more European digital GI, since much data is locked up at national and/or application level and the market is very fragmented. The EGII offers the vision to unlock this data and help build the market.

The draft Communication to Council and Parliament, "GI2000: Towards a European Policy Framework for GI", examines barriers and proposes ways to improve the GI market environment and to enable further development.

The Joint Research Centre (JRC) plays an important role in the creation of the EGII. Its mission is to provide customer-driven scientific and technical support for conception, implementation and monitoring of EU policies.

The Space Application Institute (SAI) is the leading institute inside JRC working with GI/GIS. The main role of the JRC in the EU for GI and GIS is to provide:

• technical support/concertation for the services of the European Commission which collect and use GI;
• a technology watch on interoperability, GI and GIS standards and market monitoring;
• assistance for the creation of the EGII;
• harmonised and coherent multidisciplinary databases for an enlarged EU.

Different EC services make intensive use of GI to support themselves in the set-up and monitoring of EU policies: agriculture, transport, environment, international relations, regional policy, industrial policy, fishing, international co-operation. The JRC provides support to different services by designing management tools, developing applications, creating and/or maintaining pan-European datasets.

The JRC also supports EU industrial policy, for example by producing and updating the "Strategic View of GIS Research and Technology Development for Europe" in consultation with the EU GI and GIS community.

This document has now been edited twice, by a group of invited experts. The key themes of the document are:

• Interoperability and Standards
• Data Generalisation
• Data Quality and Integrity
• Data Access
• Data Modelling and Spatial Analysis
• Research and Development Methodology
• Training, Education and Dissemination.

The result of the different hearings organised to set up this document shows the importance of content for the future GI RTD (research and technology development) activities in the Fifth RTD Framework Programme and in national programmes.

The EC as a market stimulator

This section focuses mainly on future activities, organised under the 5^th RTD Framework Programme (5FP). Geographic information appears across the whole of 5FP, as a necessary tool in many different thematic programmes. However, most generic GI research will appear in the Information Society Technologies (IST) programme. This programme is organised into four Key Actions (KA) and additional activities:

• KA1: Systems and services for citizens
• KA2: New methods of work and electronic commerce
• KA3: Multimedia content
• KA4: Essential technologies and infrastructures
• Future and emerging technologies
• Research networking
• Cross-programme themes.

Most of the GI RTD activities fit within the objectives of KA3: Multimedia content. KA4 deals with infrastructure and essential technologies, which could be applied in GIS. KA1 will focus mainly on applications for citizens and administrations: transport and environment are potentially heavy GI users. KA2 focuses much more on new methods of work and electronic commerce. Research networking is a good framework for supporting the GI research community with infrastructure. The cross-programme theme encompasses one line of action specific for GI, focusing on EGII.

The main activities of DG XII are also presented, focusing mainly on applications using GI and Earth Observation intensively: environment, agriculture, climate, marine science and coastal management, risks and hazards, land planning and infrastructure, etc.

EUROGI session: 4^th session of "Geodata for all in Europe : the identification of specific European needs for GI and GIS"

This brainstorming session was convened to provide input to GI2000 and 5FP, focusing the debate on the JRC document "A Strategic View of GIS Research and Technology Development for Europe" and considering the wider debate on GI standardisation processes.

Some needs were identified:

• Languages - the EU has more than 12 different languages.
• Semantics: what are the meanings of words, expressions, terms, etc.
• Definition of features: track, road, highways, etc.
• Definition of legends in different disciplines: geology, etc.
• Character sets, accents, umlauts, alphabets, etc.
• Different approaches to administrative boundaries, cadastral systems.
• Different methods for measuring, sampling, collecting environmental data, etc.
• To consider EU enlargement, increasing the number of combinations of the same types of problems.

In addition, cultural differences are important, the structure of the markets are different from one country to another, the structure and mandate of public bodies are different and legal issues and infrastructures exhibit great diversity across Europe.

EC as an actor of the market

The survey of the EU geo-spatial and environmental information needs based on EU policies

The JRC and DG XII organised a survey of the EU Geo-spatial and Environmental Information Needs based on EU policies. This survey is driven by the debate on various long-term EO (Earth Observation) strategy options, the emergence of commercial very high resolution (1m) EO platforms in the US and a current re-thinking of approach: from "push" to "pull".

16 policies/themes were addressed by the study and more than 50 DG staff were interviewed within 15 EC DGs. 5 cases were developed as a starting point:

• Regional development and cohesion, prioritising spatial planning;
• Land resources management, prioritising agriculture;
• Environmental conventions;
• Environmental indicators;
• Security, including risks and hazards.

The horizontal and strategic issues were also addressed:

• Expansion of the EU;
• Need for harmonised (pan-European) and continuous (long term) information;
• Need for independent data sources.

The GISCO project

The GISCO (Geographic Information System of the Commission) project, established in 1991 aims at:

• Database management: development, maintenance and updating of the database up to GISCO quality standards;
• Map production;
• Spatial analysis: development and processing of applications to automate the analysis needed for policy support and definition purposes, e.g. to model spatial impact of TEN;
• Desktop GIS environment: to provide the user with the appropriate tools and knowledge;
• Dissemination of geographic information;
• Product development: specific tools to disseminate GISCO data;
• Project management and policy definition.

GISCO maintains relationships with National Mapping Agencies (NMA) and National Statistical Organisations (NSO), to strengthen collaboration with Member States and to participate in EU co-ordination activities in GI.

The Eurostat dissemination department and the associated data shops disseminate data.

The introduction of GIS tools and products in everyday work at DG XVI.

DG XVI is responsible for both the implementation of regional policies intended to eventually erase all economic differences among the regions of the EU, and the management of funds provided for the ERDF (European Reconstruction and Development Fund) and COHESION programmes.

Until 1992, even though geographical maps were widely used, few DG XVI employees thought of adding the spatial component, or in other words the territorial location, to the subjects with which they were dealing.

GIS has enabled different categories of users to visualise the where, how, and why of what they were doing.

The European Environment Agency (EEA)

The EEA mandate is to provide the Community and Member States with objective, reliable and comparable information at European level. The activities of EEA can be summarised as:

• Monitoring;
• Analysing;
• Assessing;
• Reporting;
• Informing.

An example of EEA activity is the Spatial and Ecological Assessment (SEA) of the TEN, realised by a working group with DG XI, DG VII, EEA and Eurostat. The project aims to develop and test a number of indicators, to consider the availability of the data and to identify issues for further research. Most of the work was based on the GISCO database on TEN.

The use of GI and GIS to support the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP)

In November 1993, a service was established in the Directorate General for Agriculture (DG VI) of the European Commission, in order to enable its agents to include more explicitly and with more detail the spatial dimension of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Commission.

The CAP shifted in the early 1990's towards the provision for a greater role for rural development. Diversification of the rural economy was recognised to be a key element. CAP has now to deal with a domain that is formed by a close cross-link between economic and social factors and geophysical features. A GIS service was set-up to provide a powerful tool enabling integration of interrelated spatial features.

The debate

Instead of reporting the different interventions in the debatesensus stricto, we present an interpreted summary of the key points.

The need for a Commission's data policy

Everybody recognise that the Commission is currently the most important user of pan-European GI data. However, the way the Commission acquires data and dissemination policies are not yet transparent. Does the Commission need pan-European base data?

The position of the NMAs is difficult. They have to move from a monopolistic public service to a commercial activity, and they collaborate in the frame of MEGRIN to invest in the creation of such base data. On one side, the Commission expects commercial behaviour from data providers, but has not yet defined a clear data policy. On the other side, the NMAs want to continue as they have previously worked, i.e. to receive budget to create this pan-European database.

The Commission is a heavy user of GI, this data come from various sources and contain many gaps. To avoid duplicated efforts in data improvement, updating, etc. a data policy is needed at European level.

A key issue of such policy is also the "official" character of the data; as they support policy definition and policy monitoring, much data needs to be officially sanctioned, provided by Member States. Because of this official status, the question of data quality is not always considered.

This EC internal data policy has also to define the common needs for GI and to define ways to co-fund base data acquisition.

The data dissemination policy has also to face the problems of copyright and other forms of IPR protection, as much data is owned by National organisations.

To formulate such data policy, the Commission's decision-makers need to be more aware of such problems.

The Commission has also to include data dissemination outside the Commission in its policy.

Dissemination is organised by the office of publications, EUROSTAT publishes statistical data, but GISCO does not disseminate geographical data, as they do not have copyright clearance to do so.

GI2000 and EGII

GI2000 should help to clarify the process of creating the EGII, which will be neither a top-down, nor a bottom-up approach, but a process built through concertation of the efforts of many different actors. It will build more on complementary aspects of different approaches rather than on a single well-defined process. It will require the co-ordination of many projects, programmes, initiatives and national infrastructures, converging to the EGII, rather than appear as a single major dedicated project.

The problem of data access is also mentioned, with "access" defined as "data availability at affordable prices". Both GI2000 and the Strategic View document mention this issue.

The lack of awareness of politicians and major decision-makers is an impediment to the development of GI activities. Effort has to be made by the GI community to provide a strategic vision and to raise awareness about it in a manner and format which is understandable by non-experts.

The European GI market is fragmented, the lobbying force is weaker than many other markets, and the GI community needs to be organised and must support a long-term process of raising awareness.

GI in 5FP

The themes in 5FP are partially content related (KA3) and partially focussed on technology, wherein KA4 has the strongest focus on technology, addressing issues that are not directly related to GIS, but that could be used within GIS, as a future technology base, e.g. object-orientation, business objects, high-speed networking, etc.

The 5FP strives also to involve the users much more. Some European organisation, such as GISIG, contribute to providing the user's point of view, to set up networks of people and to identify best practice.

GI2000 and EGII are not monolithic. Some blocks of EGII will be implemented soon and they will also build on national GI and related IST initiatives. GI2000 is a document setting out a vision to move forward on developing the EGII, rather than a programme with a specific budget, and the main funding tool will be the 5FP.

Conclusion

The European specificity discussed during the EUROGI session varies according to the abstraction level. At a high abstraction level, there are no European specific needs. At a low abstraction level, many needs, such as specific character sets, linguistic issues, semantics, etc. are identified.

The European Commission is heavy user of GI, has an increasing need for data and faces the problem of many gaps in its datasets. Without a fixed data policy, it is not clear who pays for data.

Everybody dreams about EGII to facilitate access to data, which encompasses data policy for EU.

The different services of the Commission involved with GI are starting to collaborate to combine their efforts more efficiently in data acquisition and data maintenance.