Project description
The concept of the Sub-theme Working Group

Key issues addressed
Human beings have always had the need to discover their territory and to record this knowledge in a variety of different forms and media. And for decades, Administrations too, have devoted a great deal of effort to both obtain and disseminate the information about their territory.

But Spatial Data is not only the cartographic and pure geographic databases. There are also different information systems from different resources which can further enrich the geographical component and constitute a specialized tool with data for very different application domains: land registry data, urban development and land use data, data about agricultural and natural resources, environmental data and data about biodiversity, infrastructure data and administrative data, to name a few examples. We can refer to all these different data types as spatial data.

In the developing Information Society the access to spatial information will be a key factor for spatial related decision making and could be defined as an infrastructure component. Therefore, Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) developments are currently under development on different levels from local to European. A set of organisations collect geographical data but they have little or no contact with other organisations doing similar work in neighbouring regions (from the European point of view the INSPIRE directive will focus on the harmonisation of the European developments).

From the regional point of view the use of spatial data has a lot of common aspects all over Europe and especially for cross-regional or cross-border scenarios. Keep in mind, that decision making is always spatial and does not stop on regional or national borders. Just imagine that for example reference data (maps) has to be combined with statistical data (thematic maps) to analyse economic developments within the European regions, or the planning of environmental protection areas in the Pyrenees, Alps or Carpathians without the necessary data for the relevant border area in these mountain regions. Current data show that roads do not connect over borders, information on forests is not comparable, rivers are at different levels and the same mountain can be higher in one region than in another.

The application of this spatial data at a cross-border level is undoubtedly a crucial element for the support of cross-border management of various domains, e.g. water management, tourism, environmental protection, statistics, etc. This could also be a drive for the development of both cross-border services and strategies even to the extent of common policies on Spatial information and data management.

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