EUROSPEC - A CORNERSTONE FOR THE BUILDING OF THE EUROPEAN SPATIAL DATA INFRASTRUCTURE

摘要

The European Spatial Data Infrastructure (ESDI) has long been a dream lost in the far future, and only heard from in a small community of a few visionaries and missionaries. Their preaching has finally been heard, and the INPIRE initiative, launched by the European Commission in autumn 2001 has given much press to the concepts that underlay the ESDI. One of the main concepts is that of the Common Reference Data as a key to interoperability, and one of these early and dedicated missionaries was EuroGeographics (or rather its early avatars CERCO and MEGRIN). The unambiguous mission of EuroGeographics - Europe's Association of National Mapping and Cadastre Agencies (NMCAs) - is to achieve interoperability of European mapping and other GI data. From the perspective of the data providers this is an ambitious target but, from the perspective of the data users the need for interoperable geographic information is already a need - today. The paper highlights the requirements, context and rationale for interoperable geographic information, with a particular focus on the delivery of reference data. It will then go on to describe how EuroGeographics plans to meet these requirements - in collaboration with the other key players. This will include a description of the current 'state of play' in Europe's GI interoperability (including the results of a recent survey and a summary of relevant 'cross border' initiatives). The EuroSpec programme includes the identification of the key issues that need to be addressed; and the main activities (and outcomes) of the EuroSpec project. It covers the process that will change the data integration/harmonization and provision from the current centralized architecture, to on-line on-the-fly service based on distributed architecture and web services.