EuroGeoNames

Title

EuroGeoNames

Acronym

EGN

Duration

September 2006 - March 2009

Summary

Access to consistent and reliable multilingual geographical names is essential for a number of uses including postal services, emergency services, navigation, tourism, property purchases, the mass media and applications such as Google Earth. In all of these areas, geographic names provide one of the most important keys for referencing and accessing a variety of related information. However, at the time of the project, there was no European standard or service for geographical names, rather a patchwork of heterogeneous national services that are not suitable for the European market.

The EuroGeoNames (EGN) project addressed this problem by implementing an interoperable internet service that linked and provided access to the official, multilingual geographical names data held at the national level across Europe. The target was to aggregate data for between five and 10 European countries – comprising Candidate as well as EFTA countries – by connecting their national databases in the EGN infrastructure. The user – primarily ‘value added service’ providers - was to have access to this information through a Web GIS application which enabled searching using all official European languages, including minority languages.

The project consortium brought together partners from the public, academic and private sectors embracing the full ‘value chain’ from data providers > technology partners > value added service applications. These partners had well-established working relationships based on other work, including the feasibility study that was completed in advance of this proposal. This laid the ground for a successful project that made a major contribution to opening up public sector information within a wider European spatial (geographic) information infrastructure.

EDINA Contact

James Reid

Coordinators

BKG, Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy, Germany

Funders

Matched funding – 50% from EU eContentplus programme and 50% from each Consortia member.

Partnerships

• BKG, Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy, Germany
• UU, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands (NL)
• BEV, Bundesamt für Eich- und Vermessungswesen, Austria
• SMA, Surveying and Mapping Authority of the Republic
• EGHO, EuroGeographics (Head Office), France (FR)
• UEDIN, EDINA National Datacentre, University of Edinburgh
• Geodan, Geodan Holding, The Netherlands (NL)
• GeoTask, GeoTask AG, Germany (DE)
• ESRI, ESRI Geoinformatik GmbH, Germany (DE)