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process from its beginning. Its experts actively partici-
pate in the drafting teams that are currently working
under the coordination and supervision of the
European Commission to develop the INSPIRE
Implementing Rules. These will set legally binding rules
on metadata; technical arrangements for the interoper-
ability and, where practicable, harmonization of spatial
data sets and services; network services, and data
sharing and reuse.
The experience gained in these activities is comple-
mentary to the development of GeoSciML and relevant
to the geolog-specific development of interoperability in
the GEOSS framework.
The International Year of Planet Earth and
OneGeology
On 5 January 2006 the United Nations General
Assembly proclaimed the year 2008 to be the United
Nations International Year of Planet Earth (IYPE). IYPE
activities will span the three years 2007–2009. Its
purpose is to foster understanding of and interest in the
solid Earth, and to enhance the attention given to a
wide range of societal issues close to GEOSS societal
benefit areas:
• Reduce risks for society caused by natural and
human-induced hazards
• Reduce health problems by improving understand-
ing of the medical aspects of Earth science
• Discover new natural resources and make them avail-
able in a sustainable manner
• Build safer structures and expand urban areas, utiliz-
ing natural subsurface conditions
• Determine the non-human factors in climatic change
• Enhance understanding of the occurrence of natural
resources so as to contribute to efforts to reduce polit-
ical tension
• Detect deep and poorly accessible groundwater
resources
• Improve understanding of the evolution of life
• Increase interest in Earth sciences in society at large
• Encourage more young people to study Earth
sciences in university.
EuroGeoSurveys contributes to support the IYPE and
some of its related activities, in particular the
OneGeology project launched by the British Geological
Survey (BGS) in March 2007. OneGeology aims to
create a public, freely accessible, dynamic digital
geological map of the world at about 1:1,000,000 scale
as a distributed web service. Depending on the situa-
tion in individual countries, the geological maps will
initially be made available as raster images or a vector-
based geographical information system (GIS) layers.
The plan is to make the resulting digital coverage avail-
able through Google Earth and other dynamic map
browsers. Geological surveys from over 60 countries
currently contribute to this project, whereby European
geological surveys consider developing a pan-European
vector-based digital geological layer based on
highly-populated yet developing countries aspire to enjoy the same
lifestyles as those from richer areas. EuroGeoSurveys and its
members recognize the Global Earth Observation System of Systems
(GEOSS) as an essential global initiative, supported by all the diverse
and complementary components of the global Earth observation
community, to guide policy-making and governance development at
all levels, from individual to global, to address the challenging issues
faced by humanity.
European geological surveys and GEOSS
EuroGeoSurveys and its members, within the limits of their avail-
able resources, are committed to contribute to the development of
GEOSS, considering that the availability, multilingual accessibility
and interoperability of public geographic data and information, and
the progressive development of a global spatial data infrastructure
(GSDI) based on the interoperability concept. These are essential
to sustainable development. The development of interoperability is
needed not only for end users to access and combine datasets
produced by all public digital data/information suppliers describ-
ing a same data theme, wherever these suppliers are located. It is
also needed for cross-thematic combinatory processing of different
thematic digital data/information, for instance for the production
of natural risk zoning maps or groundwater resources protection.
In support of the development of GEOSS, EuroGeoSurveys and its
members contribute to a number of GEOSS relevant developments
and directly participate in existing GEOSS tasks.
GeoSciML
Within the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS), a
member of the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU),
an international working group on geological spatial data and infor-
mation interoperability has been operating since 2003 to actively
develop the geological sciences specific extension (GeoSciML) to
the Geography Markup Language (GML). This is an essential step
in developing schematic and semantic interoperability of digital
geology related national/regional digital information systems, and of
these information systems with the other environmental information
systems that form part of GEOSS. EuroGeoSurveys supports the
development of this GEOSS-relevant international standard for
digital geological data interoperability, based on Open Geospatial
Consortium standards, and several EuroGeoSurveys members
actively contribute to this.
1
The European Spatial Data Infrastructure
On 15 May 2007, the European Spatial Data Infrastructure
(INSPIRE) directive
2
was published in the
Official Journal of the
European Union
, establishing an infrastructure for spatial informa-
tion in the European Community. The directive fully recognized the
importance of accessible, shared spatial data and information in
support of the formulation and implementation of environment-
related policies and the need to address the problems regarding the
availability, quality, organization, accessibility and sharing of spatial
information common to a large number of policy and information
themes, experienced across various levels of public authority.
INSPIRE’s reach covers 34 spatial data themes, including geology;
natural hazards; water resources; energy and mineral resources, as
well as soils-related digital spatial information. EuroGeoSurveys is
among the formally registered European Spatial Data Interest
Communities (SDIC), having supported the INSPIRE legislative
GEOSS C
OMPONENTS
– O
BSERVING
S
YSTEMS