Humboldt Project for Data Harmonisation in the Framework of Gmes and Esdi: Introduction and Early Achievements

The issue of spatial information sharing and harmonisation has become of the uttermost importance in the European context, with the European Community strongly engaged not only in political and economic changes and integration, but more and more tackling technical and scientific problems. In the field of geospatial information, the need for harmonised and interoperable data is now a key topic both for users and producers of geodata. This has brought the initiatives related to the INSPIRE Directive, recently entered into force and soon to be receipted by national legislative frameworks, and to the GMES programme, now entered into its operational phase, both of them oriented to enable cross-border and cross-sector usage of geoinformation, aiming at the realization of the future European Spatial Data Infrastructure (ESDI).The HUMBOLDT project, started in October 2006, is supported by the European Community through the 6 Framework Programme and has the aim of bring together a variety of scientific, technical, economic and policy driven points of view with the aim of implementing a Framework for harmonisation of data and services in geoinformation domain.The two-pronged approach of HUMBOLDT comprises a technical side of framework development and an application side of scenario testing and validation, through an iterative refinement of the harmonisation solutions provided within the project. The Architecture of the HUMBOLDT Framework has been based on an approach which comprises as the fundamental part a Mediator Proxy able to support standard interfaces, side by side with specialized interfaces and also supporting the description of transformation rules from the viewpoint of the conceptual schema level. All those aspects and issues are being tackled within the HUMBOLDT project environment, and will be the core of the project until its official ending and beyond, towards the establishment of an ESDI.