Comité de Liaison des Géomètres Européens
CLGE
The purpose of CLGE (Council of Geodetic Surveyors in English) is to represent and to promote the interests of the geodetic surveying profession in the private and public sector in Europe, especially to the Institutions of the European Union.
ID: 510083513941-24
Lobbying Activity
Response to Legislative framework for the governance of common European data spaces
31 Jul 2020
The GeoInformation (GI) sector is suffering from a chronical lack of standardization and the current crisis has only underlined this.
Hence, CLGE welcomes robust legislative initiatives in this field.
GI is part of the vital horizontal data infrastructure for nearly all fields of policy, government and administration. However, it’s often said that the EU is powerless, because GI is Member States responsibility. This leads to a very fragmented GI policy and, even after nearly 15 years of efforts with the INSPIRE Directive, there are no authoritative Europewide GI data sets available for important themes such as roads, built environment, hydrography, etc. More and more official authorities rely on commercial or voluntary GI, even for crucial tasks including cross border security and emergency planning. No other regional power in the world relies on such a fragmented and frail geospatial data infrastructure.
It is indispensable and urgent to solve this problem and to take the legal steps levelling the way for an integrated and coordinated GI policy in the EU.
At a national level, inside and outside of the EU, Germany and Switzerland for instance couldn’t have an integrated GI policy without respectively the Bundesamt für Kartographie und Geodäsie and swisstopo. The same applies of course for the EU. The recent past has shown that without a centralized authority the cooperation between the national NMCA’s is insufficient. This is not due to the NMCA’s but to many legal, economical and operational hurdles.
The current international situation already proves the difficulties that arise from the lack of standardisation and coordination. However, one is entitled to raise the question what would happen in case of disruption, due to e.g. an international calamity, a major security threat or even an armed conflict. It is probable that the above mentioned non-authoritative commercial or voluntary data wouldn’t be fit for purpose in that case and, even worse, it’s doubtful that it would still be available.
Moreover the current GI data sets are proposed at horrendous prices, again to the benefit of commercial and voluntary competitors.
It is important to develop licensing - and economic models, obliging all GI players in key sectors to use the same authoritative geodata at no or a low cost, without excluding the before mentioned commercial and voluntary actors, of course, but including the authoritative data originators.
Another problem resides in the funding of activities. For many years CLGE is involved in the standardization of surveying activities for real estate and land (eu Real Estate Area Label, International Property Measurement Coalition and International Land Measurement Coalition). Our approach has been welcomed as visionary by the EU (JRC) and we were asked to develop a common property measurement standard based on euREAL with CEN. However, the financial burden was put on our shoulders and surpasses our capacity.
This illustrates the fact that for GI matters, the EU relies on commercial, voluntary or even non for profit organizations while the seriousness of the topic would deserve a Europewide official approach. The current legislative initiative should make sure that these very critical issues are finally considered and CLGE offers its humble but resolute support for any concerted effort in this field.
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