International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Vol XXXV, Part B4. Istanbul 2004 Internati 
  
  
  
While European governance will be the primary beneficiary of smaller scale range(s) may also be necessary, and developed comp: 
harmonised data specifications, they will also benefit national according to needs. levels 
and sub-national government. As for any user, interoperability e | 
will allow all administrations a much wider, more economical Further, EuroSpec does not deal only in the abstractions, so the e | 
and more efficient use of GI and other geo-located data. project aims also to 
e Build a community of key stakeholders (including 4 | 
Provide new business opportunities customers, system and application developers, and other 
project partners) and involve them in the development and Extern: 
The development of these specifications as a means to implementation testing of the specifications; LE 
providing data suitable for trans-national applications will be e Test the feasibility of implementing the specifications NME 
important for a number of users, not limited to governments. through development of prototypes - “ to learn by doing”; 
Within the commercial market sector there is also demand for 
data that can be transformed to consistent European 
specifications. The most obvious example is in-car navigation 
systems (addressed, with other road sector requirements by the 
EuroRoadS project), but others include asset management 
(utilities and transport) and market analysis companies — all of 
whom are using trans-national GI today. The demand is likely 
to grow further, particularly for location based services where 
European rather than national solutions are essential to the 
viability of their business. 
and, 
e Develop implementation guidelines for NMCASs to ensure 
national datasets can be transformed to the European 
specification(s). 
2.4 EuroSpec : a process and a programme 
The long term vision of EuroSpec being interoperability of 
geolocated data across Europe, cannot be reduced to a simple 
project. It is a complex programme and a long process with 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
| EuroGe 
  
many dimensions. It is expected that the EuroSpec strategy will 25 € 
Facilitate production and maintenance of reference data aggregate the main Gl actors, à prerequisite for the vision to 
become reality. Meanwhile, as required by its nature — of being In a 
The benefits for users — governments, industry, or end-users — the Association of the main custodians of the Common Challe 
are obvious and immediate. One should not however minimise Reference Data, EuroGeographics, is leading the kick-off stage, 2003, 
the benefits that harmonised specifications will bring to the within the scope of its enlargement to a wider collaboration. can re 
production and maintenance of GI and geo-located data, realize 
primarily for common reference data. In terms of content, EuroSpec will initially focus on the “Basic coordi 
Harmonised specifications will immensely facilitate the sharing Data" define by INSPIRE (see above). needs 
of information between the various data providers/producers. and to 
The current practice of parallel and sometimes conflicting The internal process will be to synchronise with the different One-S. 
maintenance of the same information in different databases, due existing and future EuroGeographics and other relevant tasks, 
to data incompatibility, will significantly decrease. Reducing projects, and create suitable mechanisms for converging on the facing 
duplication will reduce the cost of maintenance, increase the series of issues that are required for interoperability, such as : investi 
quality and reliability of the data, and reduce the time interval e Identification of needs and requirements system 
between the occurrence of an event and the availability of the e Schema, specifications and metadata their a 
relevant information to the users. e Technical tools and architecture unti 
: 3 i . : e Pricing and licensing strategies 
All of the above points to an increasing need for ‘borderless’ e Partnerships, etc... 
geographic information that can only be realised once agreed NM » Rel 
European specification are in place. Common specification will N ees 
greatly benefit a large number of applications ranging from x TY ETeM 
navigation, workforce and fleet management, environment, ei EURE 
disaster and emergency monitoring and management, to a cuta e EuroG 
variety of tourism and hobby services. Facilitating access and qr ers EuroG 
exploitation of the data for governance, the industry and the TD UD E E M di / EuroR 
citizen, it will multiply the actual value of GI manifold. | project xxx z ee ure / EuroR 
ES SQ TS ET “Geog 
2.3 Objectives dlEuroRoads 70 ES OS GiMolI 
: à bits | X RR INSPII 
The primary goal for the EuroSpec project is lo develop S9 SABE 
common and agreed European specifications for reference data State o 
into which national - and sub-national - specifications can be 
transformed for trans-national applications. 
EuroSpec main deliverable — the specification — comprises two 
main parts: 
A common description of the data content, as a feature and 
attribute catalogue; ideally this would be scale-less or valid, 
say, from scale 1:1.000 to 1:1 million, and uniformly 
understood throughout Europe, across languages and cultures 
Common structure(s) or data model(s) that would probably 
need to be narrower in terms of scale range; considering the 
current availability of data across Europe, it is envisaged to 
focus on a typical scale of 1:10.000; data model(s) applicable to 
  
The figure shows how it is expected that each individual project 
would contribute to different interoperability aspects, in an 
iterative process that will build the common framework for the 
ESDI. 
As for positioning the different components of the strategy 
within the European context, the management of the EuroSpec 
programme will need to also monitor the integration and 
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