Esdi-net+: Exchange of Experiences and Best Practices - a European Initiative -

Technological development and increasing awareness of geodata and its use has caused an explosion of digital content. However, this was not accompanied by dissemination and accessibility measures. Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs), allowing extensive reuse of geoinformation, may offer a solution. SDIs face organisational, technological, legal, cultural and linguistic challenges. The enrichment of geodata by semantically well-defined metadata and widespread implementation of SDIs, as foreseen by INSPIRE, could help to overcome these difficulties. The European thematic network eSDI-Net+, co-funded by the EC, aims at bringing together existing SDI key players and target users to facilitate exchange of experiences and best practices at sub-national level. Therefore the project developed a SDI assessment methodology and framework. It identified about 200 working, accessible and intelligible SDI solutions and selected 12 best practices. The next step is to transfer these experiences back to local communities and to disseminate them among the global GI community worldwide.