Commonalities in the production of authoritative data

EuroSDR Report following 'Commonalities in the production of authoritative data' workshop

We recently partnered with EuroSDR to produce a questionnaire and workshop aiming to identify common problems in the data supply chain during the production of Authoritative Geospatial Data.

Spatial data has long been recognised as the cornerstone of many operational decisions. This can vary from delivering government policy, managing assets, combatting climate change, solving humanitarian crises and building sustainable strategies to improve health, education and equality while spurring sustainable economic growth.

The importance of spatial data has been recognised with phrases such as “Everything happens somewhere”, “80% of data has a location” or “data is the oxygen of our GIS”. Adding to this are the lessons learnt through the COVID crisis which has shown us the importance of spatial data and good quality spatial data to respond at a local, national and global level to the pandemic. As National Mapping Agencies, partners of National Mapping Agencies and academia we are responsible for providing or advising on the production of good quality authoritative spatial data, that is data with a legal mandated use, that is fit for purpose. Therefore 1Spatial in partnership with EuroSDR have run a project to identify good practice and common problems in the production of Authoritative Data to ensure good quality authoritative data continues to be widely made available across Europe.

This project has set out to identify commonalities in the production of authoritative data by National Mapping Agencies, demonstrate examples of good practice and identify any common challenges. EuroSDR could then use this information to identify research topics where greater automation or shared standards might drive future solutions to these challenges. To start, a questionnaire was published which had a strong response from nearly 50 agencies across Europe. This was followed by a workshop held in June 2021 to discuss some observations in the questionnaire responses in more detail.

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