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ETeMII
Integrating GI into the information society.
Accompanying measure to support the up of a European Territorial Management Information Infrastructure
Yves Reginster
ETeMII co-ordinator on behalf of GISFORM
GERE SA
35 rue J.F. Kennedy
L – 7327 Steinsel
Luxembourg
Tel. +352 333232
Fax. +352 333982
Mail: yves.reginster@gere.lu
4th Global Spatial Data Infrastructure Conference
Cape Town South Africa
13-15 March 2000
Abstract
This Accompanying Measure (AM) project aims at organising a network of excellence bringing together many key stakeholders in the field of territorial management for the purpose of supporting and co-ordinating the relevant on-going information infrastructure activities; particular attention will be paid to users’ needs. The goal is to build consensus on the following technical issues that are the foundation of ETeMII:
• reference data
• data access policy
• interoperability standards implementation
• integration of space tools: GNSS EO and telecom
• active participation in global initiatives: OGC ISO GSDI ..
To build awareness is an important component of the AM . ETeMII will invite contributions to the emerging European Geographic Information Infrastructure and encourage metadata services implementation of standards and the construction of reference data.
Reference data: The objective is to reach a European and global (GSDI) technical consensus on the definition of reference data and making them available at affordable cost.
Metadata: Through workshops and other awareness building activities the aim is to build upon existing initiatives to reach some consensus on the way to meet users’ needs and to remove barriers to data access. It is important to enable users to search for any kind of information with a single tool. ETeMII will pay attention to semantics and the use of multiple interoperable thesauri to record the multi-cultural and multi-lingual characteristics of the European Information Society.
Standards and interoperability: The work will be based on seeking interoperability standards requirements and offering awareness on existing extensive but possibly incomplete interoperability standards activities to target. At the same time it will ensure that there are new observation windows between pure research activities and standards development.
Introduction
The European Geographic Information Infrastructure (EGII) is a long process made difficult with the huge variety of existing data infrastructure in different Member States. The EGII has two main components a technical one and a political / organisational one.
The political component of EGII
From the political point of view we are still far from having reached true awareness on the part of European decision makers not to mention achieving a true European Geographic Information (GI) policy. The EC action for GI focuses more on RTD and market development stimulation. However we hope that the growing number of national political initiatives will soon act as catalysts for a European GI policy.
The ETeMII project does not aim at working on political issues even if it’s difficult to dissociate policy from technical issues.
The technical component
Managing a territory requires an ongoing decision process and monitoring. The information society enables fast evolution thus increasing the need for timely and accurate data to be made available and the need for methods and technologies to exploit data providing relevant information.
Territorial management involves many fields: agriculture environment transport fisheries land use planning geo-marketing geology etc. The principles of sustainable development agreed upon at the Rio de Janeiro and Kyoto meetings have created an increasing need to combine data and information from these different disciplines. Most of this information is related to the Earth.
The only way to succeed in combining data and to keep coherence in the decision-making process is to create an infrastructure that makes the reference data and system available for all users from all fields regardless of the their works scope (from local regional national European to international level).
Three key issues are identified as component of EGII and are the main concerns of ETeMII:
• The base data
• The metadata services
• The standards and interoperability.
The project organisation
To reach a consensus on the three identified main topics it is fundamental to bring together as much as possible stakeholders. The ETeMII consortium brings together:
• Three national GI associations:
o GISFORM (It) is co-ordinator of the project GISFORM is an association in charge of the Italian National Co-ordination committee for the creation of the National reference data;
o AFIGEO (Fr) is the French association for GI they are very active to support the creation of the national spatial data infrastructure;
o CNIG Portugal is the Portuguese GI association they are pioneers in the creation of a national infrastructure.
• Three European GI association:
o EUROGI is the umbrella association for GI in Europe its members are the national associations and other European associations;
o AGILE is the association of the GI laboratories in Europe they represent the academic and research world;
o MEGRIN is the association of National Mapping Agencies covering most of European continent mapping agencies.
• The industry:
o SICAD Geomatics gmbh (De) is an important GIS software editor in Europe they joined the consortium with no budget showing the interest they have for ETeMII topics;
o Open GIS Consortium Europe Ltd is a company created by Open GIS in order to have a European interface to run project. Most of European industry is represented through OGC Europe.
• The consultants:
o GERE / NMG Lux SA (Lu) as consultant performs project co-ordination tasks on behalf of GISFORM. GERE / NMG Lux is also active in metadata and EC funded projects analysis providing in addition input to different other topics of ETeMII project.
o Geobase Consultants Ltd (UK) is specialised in standard making especially in GI sector. They are heavily involved in OGC process as well as ISO.
• The Research Institutions
o The Joint Research Centre Space Application Institute (ISPRA) is also an important actor of the project they bring their knowledge of the needs from the European Commission itself and they show their interest in theting up of an European Geographic Information Infrastructure through their active participation in ETeMII.
o Technical University of Vienna: from academic sector since many years they showed great interest in main ETeMII topics.
The project is divided in 7 work packages:
1. Project management
2. User’s requirement analysis
3. Reference data
4. Metadata: a key to data access
5. interoperability standards
6. Dissemination
7. Project’s assessment and evaluation
Project description
In this chapter we concentrate our focus on technical tasks: user’s needs assessment is the most important being the basement of other activity; the three other work packages focusing on the main ETeMII themes: reference data metadata and standards interoperability.
The users requirements
Different methods and tools will be used to assess user’s requirement: several workshop will be organised internet discussion list and desk study.
The main target is the widest possible GI users audience from local to European level. Pan European base data does not mean small scale data but data specification fitting with the largest possible range of usages.
The workshops
The first step in workshop is the local level 5 national workshop will be organised in local languages first to raise awareness about ETeMII and second to receive feedback from local users. Workshops will be organised in France Portugal Italy United Kingdom and Austria.
In the same way a workshop will be organised targeting larger international users such as the European Commission itself but also users with a pan European or cross border focus.
The discussion list
Internet discussion list is in one side a powerful communication media but such tool is so much used by everybody that we risk to loose audience for too specific and specialised discussions. However we will use such method to launch debate but also to communicate information about our results. The strategy will be to work with only one discussion list dedicated to European GI business including discussion about European GI policy.
Our effort will concentrate on list moderation and animation.
The desk study
He European Commission funds many projects working with geographic information. Running their projects each consortium has specific needs for base data to find available data to advertise results to be interoperable or to integrate different tools and technologies for a particular aim. We expect to identify major trends and needs in this area to be able to exploit such information for the three themes.
The reference data
The objectives of the work package is to reach a technical consensus at European level and at a second stage at global level (GSDI) on the definition of reference data considering the need to make them available at affordable cost.
The main aim is to build ETeMII on top of National Infrastructures and to create for Europe a minimum level of reference data affordable and usable. It is a bottom-up approach co-ordinating activities from local authorities users level up to the European and global level.
Many Member States agree to create such reference data from existing national data.
Huge amounts of GI data are produced every day in Europe. The main challenge is to succeed to make these data freely accessible at an affordable cost.
To reach such an objective many technological issues still need to be solved:
• Defining providing specifications for a minimum level of reference data enabling the creation of pan-European reference data as the basis of coherence for all thematic territorial management data. The focus is to be on the data used by the most people. The majority of users work at local or regional level with a scale range between 1/1.000 and 1/10.000.
• Assessing the users needs for reference data making them understandable for data producers.
• The access to GI is of great importance for European society and the economy; the interaction between public and private sector is far from being understood we are at the early stages of understanding the I economy.
• The more general issues will be also discussed: terminology principles for defining reference datas ?-version for EGII reference datas definition …
To support the debate a study on the situation in Europe including accessing countries has to assess the existing reference data. This survey will include cadastral mapping and analyse how to create a European cadastral map.
The consensus has to be built not only inside the consortium but also with the widest possible GI users community.
To reach this objective all communication and working tools will be used: Internet workshop and publications.
The work package will be closed with a European workshop aiming at presenting the results reached and reaching consensus on them. Such workshop will be chaired by EUROGI.
The metadata
Many metadata projects already exist at national and European level offering services based on several standards: CEO ESMI GDDD GEIXS ETC/CDS GISEDI La Clé PETIT etc. working with the main standards: CEN TC287 GILS CIP etc. The Open GIS Consortium (OGC) are also developing a catalogue interface specification based on ISO 15046-15.
The activities of the present work package will build upon existing work mainly on CEO initiative: the Catalogue of Interoperability Protocol (CIP).
Through clustering workshops awareness activities the idea is to reach some consensus on the way to meet main users needs and to remove barriers to data access.
Metadata is recognised by information society standard organisation as a key issue. The Joint Technical Committee of ISO and IEC (JTC 1 SC32) combined effort between CEN and ISO deals with metadata SC 32 is nowting up a web-based repository of cross-sector metadata working in a previous stage on ISO/TC211 and Health care data. The JTC1/SC 32 repository will be the kernel of the cluster this work package will organise.
It is important to enable the searching of any kind of information with a single tool. A particular focus will be given to semantics and the use of multiple interoperable thesauri to record the multi-cultural and multi lingual characteristic of the European Information Society.
An important issue: semantics and thesaurus
Semantics and thesaurus
Most of metadata services use a thesaurus to help users in referencing their data and information. Most standard organisations face a nearly impossible task to standardise semantics falling on semantic problems. Each region each country (even with the same language) traditionally uses different words to express a concept.
In addition depending on needs organisations create their own thesaurus some of them are generalist like GEMETT created by EEA for environment other are specialised like the one created by the GEIXS project on geology. Even if both systems are compliant with the same metadata standards they are not interoperable because they deal with different thesauri. The aim of this task is to raise the awareness of stakeholders producing recommendations on how to keep interoperability between thesauri. The same solution should help to solve the problems of synonyms and multilingual problems of thesaurus.
To ensure interoperability the workshop organised by CEO in Santorini came to the conclusion that the solution is to define a kernel unique "entry point" to metadata including a thesaurus. In that way discussion with Dublin Core is a way forward.
Most of the work is already done there is now a strong need for co-ordination to succeed the task.
Standards and interoperability
The problem
Standards and interoperability are critical issues to succeed to up ETeMII. In relation to FP projects in particular but in reality the whole market RTD projects research activities and interoperability standards developments have insufficient co-ordination through common tasks and interests. This results in different visions of the GI market and in particular its opportunities for integration with and enhancement of traditional approaches to information handling and processing.
The schema expresses the interactions between RTD project partners the standard actors and the research actors. The project partners are the users they have to express their needs to the research actors and to the standard actors. Such communication can not be effective without important awareness from research and standard actors to the project actors to make them aware of the benefits of using standards.
Interoperability is now led by the US association OGC where major US companies take the lead. European Geographic IT is more fragmented making a strong European voice difficult to reach. In addition European specificities have to be considered mainly the multilingual issues and the cultural diversity.
The objectives
The work package tasks will be based on seeking interoperability standards requirements from clustered FP-4 and FP-5 projects dealing with territorial management information and/or technology and offering awareness of existing very extensive but possibly incomplete interoperability standards activities to the active FP-4 and FP-5 projects. At the same time it will ensure that there are new observation windows between pure research activities and standards development.
The identification of all projects will be done in the frame of the present project in a specific horizontal task.
Many GI standards already exist the main problems they face is the difficulty users have to implement them. In parallel several activities have to be run:
• To raise awareness on the need and the potential of implementing GI standards
• Through research network to bring together users data providers and software developers. The aim is to analyse how to improve standards and make their implementation easier. User recommendations will be sent to standardisation bodies in order to reach the objective.
• To define adequate level of standards mandatory for ETeMII related to the main issues: metadata data format reference systems …and to identify needs for further standards developments.
Task description
All workshops to be organised to fulfil the tasks described below will be jointly organised with workshops related to other work package tasks.
The primary objective of this phase is to ensure that all the identifiable standards requirements are collected from FP-4 and FP-5 projects. This will include projects that only recognise a peripheral interest in GI for example those that rely on property addresses but are more concerned with occupier attributes than property or land attributes. It is apparent that interoperability standards requirements are not directly indicated by a RTD project oriented analysis because projects will make internal standards decisions that oriented to their own programme and not an external standards development programme. Consequently the accompanying measure should use projects as case studies of innovative approaches that can have a better chance of European or global roll-out after the RTD project is completed. Moreover this part of the accompanying measure is dependent on a suitable clustering activity having been started and also the development of a methodology that all the project partners can implement.
Barriers identification
Using the above base data undertake an objective as possible analysis to identify the barriers to RTD project exploitation that can be attributed to standards. Compare this with completed/ forthcoming standards from Electronic Commerce Open GIS Consortium ISO/ TC 211 ISO/IEC JTC1/SC 32 etc. Included will be a validation workshop geared to other aspects of the accompanying measure to identify the priorities for new interoperability standards objectives.
Potential solutions phase:
The primary objective will be to build a dialogue between the RTD project teams and the standards activities. It will be concerned with the exchange of information and exclude all recruitment activities (that are to some extent funded in existing projects such as GIPSIE ).
Overview of relevant standards:
To provide an overview of technical standardisation that is of interest to the project teams identified to be covered by the accompanying measure. This has been identified as an integration task based on existing sources mainly the draft and completed standards themselves and overview standards.
Vision statement
Using material provided by the Open GIS Consortium ISO/TC 211 ISO/IEC JTC 1 etc. develop a vision statement with European examples of the vision that should be adopted for Interoperable Open systems.
Metadata on standards
Development of catalogues (that is metadata) covering standards stakeholders and their interests Standards projects and pure research results to provide analysable information for use in RTD projects.
Plans for Future Action
The two objectives of the action plan will be to provide a method to ensure that the work necessary to create any new standards required is undertaken and meets the specific objectives for these standards. The second objective will be to identify a plan to support new projects project evaluation and post-RTD project implementation.
List of new standards needs
Provide a list of new standards or research required applying the criteria for new OGC and ISO work such as title scope justification references sponsor etc. along with a programme for achieving these through the recognised bodies. The work item includes co-ordination with the ‘recognised bodies’. Within the task distinction needs to be made between standards that require pre-research research that is ripe for harmonisation and standards work that is not research sensitive.
Best practice
Provide a series of generic plans for each chosen information community to show how interoperability standards can be implemented (which how and when). This involves original work and includes a promotion seminar.
Conclusions
The project started the 10th January 2000 we are now in the beginning of the process our aim is to be more active providing input in the GSDI process related to our main topics. Information about ETeMII will be available at http://www.ec-gis.org/etemii .