Ordnance Survey, which reports to the Department for Business Innovation & Skills (BIS), has signed the Consortium Agreement and Grant Agreement to participate in the European Location Framework (ELF.) project. The EU funded project will provide the platform for a global standard of geographic information to enhance business without barriers across Europe.
The three year project, consisting of three phases, is supported by a consortium of 30 partners across Europe, whose work is co-funded by the European Commission.
John Carpenter, Ordnance Survey’s Director of Strategy, said: “Together with organisations across Europe, including UK partners, this project has provided an opportunity for Ordnance Survey to contribute to and deliver a European spatial data infrastructure (SDI). The project shows how government, industry and academia can sucessfully work together in supporting the wider use of geo-information and enable the creation of innovative value-added services.
“The ELF platform will add value to INSPIRE data by accomplishing cross border harmonisation to enable INSPIRE services to be utilised and shared, provide easy access and connection to SME applications, and provide authoritative National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) data to inform European policy decision making.”
The consortium is committed to continue to provide the ELF Platform beyond the end of the project, to enable growth in the use and re-use of trustworthy, accurate and re-usable official reference geo-information on not only a European, but global level.
The website www.elfproject.eu provides further information on the objectives and deliverables of the project.
The UK partners involved in the project include – Europa Technologies Limited, Snowflake Software Limted,1Spatial Group Limited, Open Geospatial Consortium Limited and Netrius Management Services Limited.
INSPIRE (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community) is a European Directive which aims to establish an infrastructure for spatial information in Europe to support Community environmental policies, and policies or activities, which may have an impact on the environment. It comprises legislation to make data and services discoverable and interoperable across Europe. As a result of this legislation, public sector data providers across Europe are now starting to publish their data to common specifications and using common web service standards, thus making the data and services interoperable across Europe. For more information see: http://inspire.jrc.ec.europa.eu/
2. To foster the wider use of geo-information and enable the creation of innovative value-added services, the ELF project will, through an interlinked series of nine work packages:
Add value to INSPIRE data by accomplishing cross border harmonisation;
Provide a high performance ELF platform and cloud services that support multiple national feeds and a wide spectrum of value-added services;
Develop operational services, which support the policy and legislative programme being developed in parallel in the ISA funded EULF initiative lead by JRC;
Demonstrate the usability of the ELF platform and cloud services for key European policy areas and other users including SMEs;
Support integration of 3rd party thematic datasets and National Spatial Data Infrastructures (particularly extending beyond the INSPIRE themes provided by NMCAs) for service implementations based on specific user needs; and
Provide a user friendly interface to find, view and compare the geo-information.
3. Ordnance Survey maintains the definitive geographic framework of Great Britain and is responsible for the surveying, production, maintenance and marketing of a wide range of geographic information (mapping), relied on by government, local authorities, business and individuals.
4. Up to 10,000 changes are made to the master map database every day. Changes in the urban and rural landscapes are captured by a team of 250 field surveyors and two light aircrafts fitted with high-powered digital cameras.
