Cultural heritage and sustainable development targets : a possible harmonisation? Insights from the European Perspective

The Agenda 2030 includes a set of targets that need to be achieved by 2030. Although none of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) focuses exclusively on cultural heritage, the resulting Agenda includes explicit reference to heritage in SDG 11.4 and indirect reference to other Goals. Achievement of international targets shall happen at local and national level, and therefore, it is crucial to understand how interventions on local heritage are monitored nationally, therefore feeding into the sustainable development framework. This paper is focused on gauging the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals with reference to cultural heritage, by interrogating the current way of classifying it (and consequently monitoring). In fact, there is no common dataset associated with monitoring SDGs, and the field of heritage is extremely complex and diversified. The purpose for the paper is to understand if the taxonomy used by different national databases allows consistency in the classification and valuing of the different assets categories. The European case study has been chosen as field of investigation, in order to pilot a methodology that can be expanded in further research. A cross‐comparison of a selected sample of publicly accessible national cultural heritage databases has been conducted. As a result, this study confirms the existence of general harmonisation of data towards the achievement of the SDGs with a broad agreement of the conceptualisation of cultural heritage with international frameworks, thus confirming that consistency exists in the classification and valuing of the different assets categories. However, diverse challenges of achieving a consistent and coherent approach to integrating culture in sustainability remains problematic. The findings allow concluding that it could be possible to mainstream across different databases those indicators, which could lead to depicting the overall level of attainment of the Agenda 2030 targets on heritage. However, more research is needed in developing a robust correlation between national datasets and international targets

CentropeMAP and CentropeSTATISTICS – Cross-Border Thematic Mapping

The Centrope region unites the territory near the common boundaries of Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and the Slovak Republic. To enhance cross-border information exchange in municipal and regional planning, CentropeMAP was introduced in the year 2005 as a geoportal displaying datasets from the Centrope partner countries in a common interface and is subsequently extended in terms of content and functionality, thus allowing an easy view across the borders. CentropeMAP is also the basis for the interactive cross-border statistics information system CentropeSTATISTICS which allows statistic figures from the fields of demography, economy, and land useto be compared with each other, analysed and graphically displayed. CentropeSTATISTICS concentrates on data at municipality level, which is the major difference to other existing cross-border statistics portals which often present their data only on NUTS 3 or even NUTS 2 levels which is insufficient for a cross-border analysis on a small scale

CentropeMAP und CentropeSTATISTICS – interaktive Zeitreihendarstellung grenzübergreifender statistischer Daten

Centrope ist eine grenzüberschreitende Region, die die aneinander grenzenden Bundesländer bzw. Landkreise der vier Staaten Österreich, Tschechische Republik, Ungarn und Slowakische Republik umfasst. Seit nunmehr 15 Jahren sind Geodaten aus diesen vier nationalen Teilregionen in einem gemeinsamen Geoportal (www.centropemap.org) online verfügbar. Eine fünfsprachige Website bietet Basisinformationenzur Region, das Geoportal ist rein in englischer Sprache gehalten. Seither wird der inhaltliche und funktionelle Umfang stets erweitert, aus einem reinen Geodatenviewer ist mittlerweile ein umfangreiches Werkzeug zur Bearbeitung und räumlichen Darstellung von statistischen Daten geworden. Dafür werden von den jeweiligen nationalen Statistikämtern auf jährlicher Basis Daten bereitgestellt, die in CentropeMAP grenzüberschreitend aufbereitet und als gemeinsame Karte dargestellt werden können. Anders als bei vielen anderen öffentlich zugänglichen Statistikportalen, die ihre Daten meist nur auf den recht grobmaschigen Betrachtungseinheiten NUTS 3 oder NUTS 2 anbieten, konzentriert sich CentropeMAP auf Daten der Gemeindeebene. Dies schränkt zwar den inhaltlichen Umfang etwas ein, denn nicht alle statistischen Erhebungen werden auf der Gemeindeebene durchgeführt; viele Daten gibt es generell nur in kleinermaßstäbigen Einheiten. Die neuesten nfunktionelle Erweiterungen, die hier vorgestell werden, sind zum einen die Möglichkeit zur Darstellung von statistischen Daten als Zeitreihe in animierter Form, und zum anderen die direkte Abrufmöglichkeit von Gemeindedaten über die Kartenansich

Interactive Visualisation of Statistical Data with the CentropeSTATISTICS Cross-Border Geoportal

The Centrope region consists of a number of adjacent counties and states along the borders between Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and the Slovak Republic, comprising regions Jihomoravský, Bratislavský, Trnavský, Győr-Moson-Sopron, Burgenland, Lower Austria, and Vienna. It was founded 2003 by the political declaration of Kittsee and aims to strengthen partnership and economy in a region which were suffering from the Iron Curtain during the second half of the 20th century. CentropeMAP is a geoportal connecting the region by collecting web map services from the partner countries. The services are brought together in a single map viewer and allow the user to experience a cross-border working area with dozens of data layers dealing with all topics which could be of interest for regional planners and similar professions. Layers are coming from the fields of biota, boundaries, elevation, imagery/base maps, inland waters, planning/cadastre, structure, and transportation. CentropeMAP went online in 2005 and was extended by the cross-border statistics database CentropeSTATISTICS in 2010. During 2015, CentropeMAP and CentropeSTATISTICS were relaunched with new software and remarkably higher speed of map generation. CentropeSTATISTICS is an extensive statistics database which is directly linked to CentropeMAP and allows its users to create thematic maps and various types of charts on the fly. It is the only available free web tool to visualise cross-border statistical data in its own connected geoportal allowing the user to influence the way of visualisation in multiple ways in the Centrope region. CentropeSTATISTICS can not only create maps, it also serves charts which are interactively created from the data in the cross-border database. The statistics database is continuously expanded in close co-operation with the statistical offices of Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Vienna, Lower Austria and Burgenland. The CentropeMAP newsletter is published twice a year and aims to inform members of state administration and statistical offices about the capabilities of CentropeMAP and CentropeSTATISTICS as well as news from the statistical offices of the partner countries. It also distributes information regarding geodata in the CentropeMAP geoportal

Development and testing of INSPIRE themes Addresses (AD) and Administrative Units (AU) managed by COSMC

Main content of this article is to describe implementing INSPIRE themes Addresses and Administrative Units in Czech Republic. Themes were implemented by Czech Office for Surveying, Mapping and Cadastre. Implementation contains developing GML files with data and designing its structure, developing and testing of INSPIRE services and preparing metadata for data and services. Besides harmonised INSPIRE themes COSMC manages also non-harmonised themes Cadastral map (KM) and Units eXtended (UX)

Data-driven Economies in Central and Eastern Europe. Challenges and Perspectives

The recently published Communication on “Building a European Data Economy” (COM(2017)9) clearly highlights the increasing importance of data as a driver for growth, innovation and job creation. It is estimated that by year 2020, the value the EU data economy will increase to EUR 643 billion, representing over 3% of the EU GDP. At the same time there is no comparable and quantifiable evidence on the current state and the future perspectives of the data driven economy in the European Union neighbouring countries. It can however safely be assumed that the role of data will be following a similar pattern, and is therefore expected to be contribution to an increasing relative share of GDP. Furthermore, some European neighbouring countries, most notably those in Central and Eastern Europe, are a recognised destination for IT businesses that grow two to three times faster than in their economy of origin. Within this context, a workshop was co-organized by the World Bank, the UN Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission (JRC). The workshop took place on 05 September as part of the annual INSPIRE Conference in 2017 (co-organised in Strasbourg and Kehl by France and Germany). The workshop explored the challenges and possibilities related with Data driven economy in Central and Eastern Europe. All the presentation of attendees are available online. The rapidly emerging spatial data infrastructures (SDI) were used as a use case to have a better insight into the data economy as they address a broad spectrum of topics that relate to the legal, technological and organisational challenges towards the use and reuse of data. Particular emphasis was put on good practices that if re-used and extended, can further foster innovation and intensify growth. This JRC technical report summarises the outcomes of the WB/UNECE/FAO/JRC workshop. It includes (i) overview of relevant processes on the global and European agenda, (ii) good practices from countries in the target region on the value-added from data that provide indications future policy directions and emerging opportunities.JRC.B.6-Digital Econom

Do open geodata actually have the quality they declare? the case study of Milan, Italy

In the past number of years there has been an amazing flourishing of spatial data products released with open licenses. Researchers and professionals are extensively exploiting open geodata for many applications, which, in turn, include decision-making results and other (derived) geospatial datasets among their outputs. Despite the traditional availability of metadata, a question arises about the actual quality of open geodata, as their declared quality is typically given for granted without any systematic assessment. The present work investigates the case study of Milan Municipality (Northern Italy). A wide set of open geodata are available for this area which are released by national, regional and local authoritative entities. A comprehensive cataloguing operation is first performed, with 1061 geospatial open datasets from Italian providers found which highly differ in terms of license, format, scale, content, and release date. Among the many quality parameters for geospatial data, the work focuses on positional accuracy. An example of positional accuracy assessment is described for an openly-licensed orthophoto through comparison with the official, up-to-date, and large-scale vector cartography of Milan. The comparison is run according to the guidelines provided by ISO and shows that the positional accuracy declared by the orthophoto provider does not correspond to the reality. Similar results are found from analyses on other datasets (not presented here). Implications are twofold: Raising the awareness on the risks of using open geodata by taking their quality for granted; and highlighting the need for open geodata providers to introduce or refine mechanisms for data quality control

Deployment of metadata: the first stage

ECP-2008-GEO-318007, eContentplu

ANALYSIS AND IMPLEMENTATION OF APPLICATION SCHEMAS FOR THE INSPIRE BUILDINGS THEME

Implementing the INSPIRE directive involves transforming various data themes into the structure and content given by Data Specifications published by the Joint Research Center of the European Commission. The data is to be published in the GML format, which is the standard for the Open Geospatial Consortium. The validity of the data structure is ensured by validation against XML schemas. These schemas are usually also provided by JRC, though not necessarily for all application schemas. Six application schemas are defined for the currently implemented Buildings theme, but XML schemas are available for only three of them. All application schemas have been analyzed, and it has been found that the most suitable data model corresponds most closely to the BuildingsExtended2D application schema. No XML schema has been provided by JRC in the current version. The BuildingsExtendedBase abstract XML schema was also needed when using the previous schemas. There is now a need to create these missing XML schemas