Urs Gerber
Head of Base Data for Environmental Monitoring
Federal Office of Topography swisstopo
Switzerland

Biography
Urs Gerber received a rural engineering diploma from the ETH Zurich in 1978. He joined swisstopo in 1984, was Manager of Information Technology from 1987 to 1999 and head of the Management Support Division from 2000 to 2001. From 2003 to 2006 he coordinated swisstopo’s Spatial Data Infrastructure Project. Currently he is head of the Competence Centre “Base Data for Environmental Monitoring” and co-leader of the project “Archiving of official geodata under federal legislation” in collaboration with the Swiss Federal Archives. He also is a member of the EuroSDR working group on Geographic Data Archiving.

Abstract
Long-term Preservation of Geospatial Gata – Journeys Through Time with the Swiss National Maps Series

Long-term preservation of geospatial data
Originally – during the pioneer phase of creating geospatial data – the goal was to have, and to be able to provide up-to-date geodata. Due to this, older versions of those data weren’t maintained, overwritten by newer data or, in the worst case, deleted. Therefore, data that were acquired using large amounts of time and money were lost forever. Today, with the greatly increasing awareness of the significance of older versions of geodata, it is necessary to keep geospatial data available over a longer period of time thus requiring holistic provisions for long-term preservation. The Federal Act on Geoinformation (Geoinformation Act, 2008) commits the producers to make their geodata available in a sustainable way.
Journeys through time with the Swiss maps Series
On this background, swisstopo published the major part of its printed maps on the office’s Internet site. Since its foundation as «Bureau topographique fédéral» by general Guillaume-Henri Dufour in 1838, swisstopo has produced three national map series (Topographische Karte der Schweiz 1:100.000, Topographischer Atlas der Schweiz 1:25.000/1:50.000), Landeskarten der Schweiz). They include approximately 7500 first and updated editions of maps in different scales. Therefore all these maps can be regarded as a cultural heritage of national significance. They are called the «topographical landscape memory of Switzerland». This modern web application shows the usefulness and value of swisstopo preserving all the older versions of the Swiss map series.