Geospatial and Earth Observation data
Publication Date/Time
2020-03-04T08:00:00+00:00
Country
Europe
Discover more about Copernicus and INSPIRE and their work with
geospatial and Earth Observation data
GEOSPATIAL DATA

Geospatial data and information management is part of various fields,
thematic areas, initiatives, and programmes within the European Union
(EU). As such, the European Commission’s
[https://ec.europa.eu/info/index_en] (EC) approach towards geospatial
and Earth Observation data are diverse and several activities are
recognisable. For example, in:

 	* Standardisation bodies such as OGC
[https://www.opengeospatial.org/], W3C [https://www.w3.org/], and ISO
[https://www.iso.org/];
 	* Legislative efforts in line with the Public Sector Information
(PSI), open data, DSM
[https://www.dsm.com/countrysites/dsmnl/nl_NL/home.html]; or
 	* Research, such as with the Joint Research Centre
[https://ec.europa.eu/info/departments/joint-research-centre_en] of
the European Union.

However, the two most well recognised driving forces to date are
Copernicus [https://www.copernicus.eu/en] and the INSPIRE Directive
[https://inspire.ec.europa.eu/]. Both initiatives have strong impacts
on the Member States (legal, organisational, semantic, and technical)
and are long standing efforts.

 

COPERNICUS

Previously known as GMES, Copernicus is the European Earth Observation
programme led by the EC and European Space Agency
[https://www.esa.int/] (ESA). Copernicus aims to provide accurate,
timely, and easily accessible information for numerous sectors,
including environmental monitoring, climate change detection, and
civil security.

For the Space Component of Copernicus, a new series of satellites was
developed, while several of these Sentinel satellites are already
operational. The Copernicus Ground Segment manages the data of the
Sentinel and contributing missions and provides access services. It is
a federation of independent ground segments for each mission, which is
linked together and coordinated by the Data Access System of the
Copernicus Ground Segment. This system acts as a hub for the network
of contributing ground segments, providing a harmonised interface to
access the data. Data and services are accessible in the form of
datasets, which are pre-defined collections of coherent products. As
part of the harmonised distribution of the data, standardised and
interoperable service are created that can be used in the INSPIRE
context.

 

INSPIRE

The INSPIRE Directive is the effort to create an EU-wide interoperable
spatial data infrastructure for sharing geospatial data, mainly for EU
environmental policies and related activities across borders. The
directive addresses 34 (geo)spatial data themes and has led to several
standards that are commonly used as the basis for numerous geospatial
applications, even outside of the targeted environmental domain. The
Directive follows a staged approach and the full implementation is
required by 2021. INSPIRE regulates data models, code lists, metadata,
and map layers for exchanging spatial datasets and services to enable
a consistent cross-border and cross-thematic communication with
minimal or no additional specific effort. Due to the nature of the
INSPIRE Directive and scope of the task, INSPIRE spawned a technical
well-versed community that is active in supra-national activities and
standardisation bodies.

At the intersection or adjacent to INSPIRE and Copernicus are several
EU activities that stimulate the larger geospatial data management.
For example, open data and open science initiatives are at the
forefront to enable a free-flowing digital economy, while early
adopters start to deal with big (geospatial) data that originates from
crowd-sourced or crowd-sensed information or other developments such
as the Internet of Things. In combination, these data sources provide
a wealth of geospatial data that require different processing and
handling strategies on the legal, organisational, semantic, technical
dimensions to allow further exploitation of the available data and to
stimulate economic growth across Europe.

 

For more information or examples on geospatial and Earth Observation
data, explore the European Data Portal’s (EDP) news archive
[/en/news-events/news]. Aware of geospatial and Earth Observation data
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