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The ELISE Action of the ISA2 Programme carried out a survey in conjunction with EuroGeographics in 2018, aimed at understanding the demand-side and supply-side perspectives related to pan-European gazetteer data and services.The results clearly showed that there is demand for an EU gazetteer to support multi-national applications or complement existing national gazetteers, for purposes such as emergency response, searching for datasets, news items, or tourism / cultural heritage sites, validating foreign addresses, etc.

Abstract

This JRC technical report summarises the ELISE (European Location Interoperability Solutions for e-Government) activities in support to the development of an EU gazetteer. Most Member States have their own national gazetteer service so, if an EU gazetteer service is to be justified, there needs to be sufficient demand for pan-European applications or sufficient added value beyond existing national gazetteers.

This report further investigates two datasets on the pan-European level: Geographical names and Addresses as the most relevant datasets for the EU gazetteer.In the report we also analyse authoritative vs. volunteered spatial datasets.

The results of the analysis showed that both data sources, official and volunteered, are complementary and mutually enhanced results can be obtained by combining the two. In addition, "Cultural Heritage Testbed" application has been developed with the aim to identify data, functionality gaps and improvements needed in different gazetteer solutions.

The findings and possible applications were discussed with several existing use cases, with cross-border and pan-European coverage. Overall findings in this report can be used to justify the relevance and importance of Geographical names and Addresses datasets in the context of defining future high value datasets at an EU level.