Nathalie Delattre
INSPIRE Programme Manager & International Projects Management
National Geographic Institute
Belgium

Biography
Nathalie Delattre works at the Mapping Agency of Belgium (NGIB) and has been involved in GIS and Operational projects management for 27 years. Since 2001, she has been leading the European production of “EuroRegionalMap” a pan-European geographical dataset distributed by the EuroGeographics association. She has participated in the European project “European spatial Data Infrastructure Network”(ESDIN) (2009-2012) and is contributing to the “European Location Framework” project (ELF) . Her main expertise is in geographical data production and maintenance within pan-European and INSPIRE frameworks. She is now involved in the INSPIRE programme at national level.

Abstract
The European Location Framework (ELF), Interoperability Solutions for European Public Administrations and the INSPIRE Directive: Major Challenges and Lessons Learnt for Delivering Authoritative, Interoperable, Cross-Border Geospatial Reference Data for a European Coverage

Co-Authors:
Anja Hopfstock, Bundesamt for Kartographie und Geodesie
Dominique Laurent, Institut National de l'Information geographique et Forestiere

The European Location Framework builds a geospatial data infrastructure and provides pan-European interoperable reference data and services from national information assets enabling users to build their work on it. ELF has set up geo-processing guidelines in order to produce geospatial data, interoperable, harmonised, cross border and of high quality. These geo- processes encompass the data transformation, the data aggregation and edge-matching, the data quality evaluation and conformance testing, the quality management, the data generalization, the incremental updates, and the visualisation. The presentation describes the best practices, major challenges and lessons learnt when applying the INSPIRE interoperability principles to those geo-processes for obtaining the relevant ELF data. The European Location Framework (ELF) has investigated some aspects of organizational, semantic and technical interoperability. The semantic interoperability covers the requirements in data interoperability. ELF has conceived several degrees in data interoperability and has set up procedures based on best practices examples to achieve them. These best practices have demonstrated the high impact of the users in the process leading the data interoperability and successful procedures to cooperate with them. Lessons learnt, the ELF project has believed in possible scenarios for achieving ELF data interoperability in short, medium and longer term. The organisational interoperability covers the co-ordination framework for collecting and maintaining the ELF data based on national cooperation in case of increasing content of required information. The ELF project proposes different options depending on the tasks and responsibilities that each stakeholder is ready to take and provides its own recommendations. The technical interoperability covers the proper use of the geo-processes (data transformation, quality/validation, edge-matching, change-detection, and generalisation) in the data supply chain for obtaining the ELF data. ELF has analysed the technical impact of the use of the INSPIRE/ELF GML as the standard for data exchange in the geo-processing steps. Based on use-cases, ELF has stated on some lessons learnt in the geo-processing efficiency, and in the geo-tools implementation.