Geospatial trends 2022: An overview of emerging trends in the geospatial community
The annual Geospatial Trends 2022 report is now published on data.europa.eu. The aim of this report is to identify opportunities from emerging trends in the geospatial community and explore how data.europa.eu can benefit from the new ways in which geospatial datasets are offered and support the latest user expectations.
The report concentrates on two trends of geospatial data that affect the European geospatial community:
- Modernising Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe (INSPIRE) and moving towards open data; and
- The role of geospatial information for Smart Cities.
The report traces the objectives of the INSPIRE Directive, especially the one improving the availability of relevant geodata by developing a framework for geospatial data sharing, making data more findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR principles). It predicts that once the implementation of high-value datasets is released, it will be exciting to explore ways to highlight the appropriate geodata that is already available through data.europa.eu.
The report then moves to discuss how the growing importance and high strategic value of "smart cities" concepts indicate that digital technologies will enhance urban life and city administration through more readily available real-time data. Data.europa.eu sees the increased availability of data as an important trend. Furthermore, the availability of real-time data also highlights the opportunity for data.europa.eu to integrate real-time data sources. Another factor to consider is the participation of citizen science activities in smart city contexts and the data generated by them, through their observations or using their own sensing devices.
The report traces the key ideas from the 2021 report against present developments. Finally, it concludes by discussing the main attention areas such as promoting the OGC API Feature endpoints, harmonising its metadata, investigating more on SensorThings API and the need for geo-visualisations to support them.
Read the report to find out more details about the constantly evolving data landscapes and how data.europa.eu is supporting this growth.
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