LIFO 2020 Switzerland - Country Factsheet

LIFO 2020 | Switzerland

Published on: 18/02/2022 Last update: 17/02/2022 Document

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Background

The Location Interoperability Framework Observatory (LIFO) monitors the implementation of location interoperability good practices in European public administrations, based on the level of adoption of recommendations in the EULF Blueprint.

The overview of 2020 location interoperability status in Switzerland is based on the information provided by swisstopo (Federal Statistics Office and the Federal Office of Topography).

LIFO 2020 Switzerland

Overview

The information collected through the LIFO 2020 data collection indicates that Switzerland has performed above the average of the surveyed countries in terms of location interoperability practices.

Switzerland has performed above the average of the surveyed countries in terms of location interoperability practices. This is mostly due to the strong positioning of the country in the “Return on Investment” and “Governance, Partnership and Capabilities” focus areas. Under the former, the country strongly engages in the communication of benefits of integrating and using location information in digital public services. Under the latter, stakeholders from different communities, domains, administrative levels and sectors, are consistently involved in the decision making process on the role of location information in Digital Government. These two elements have determined to a large extent the positive performance in the respective focus areas.

An area for improvement under “Return on Investment” entails needing to fully exploit the range of possibilities to facilitate the search of and access to (public) location data by external parties.

The “Digital Government Integration” focus area has higher results when compared with the European average. Switzerland has progressed well in the use of the Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) to deliver digital public services across sectors. However, the actions taken to involve external parties in the development and delivery of location-enabled digital public services are not particularly wide-ranging and need improving.

Very positive results also come from the “Policy and Strategy Alignment” focus area, under which the adoption of the "Swiss Geo-information Strategy” sets up a framework to make geoinformation reliable and available to everyone.

“Standardisation and Reuse” is the only focus area below the European average. This is partly due to the fact that a strategy to reuse existing authentic data is still in the planning phase and only a few registers of location information have already been implemented. However, the new organisation “Digital Administration Switzerland” has in its plans the promotion of reuse and standardisation on the e-government side.

As a non-Member State of the EU, a caveat for the results from Switzerland is that the country is not legally bound to align with EU legislation (e.g. the INSPIRE Directive or the GDPR). This may affect the results on some indicators that are more specifically related to alignment with EU legislation. The country has however, decided to adopt the INSPIRE Directive insofar as it is beneficial for Swiss institutions, particularly with regard to cooperation with EU Member States.

LIFO index for 2020

The value of the overall LIFO index combining the scores for all focus areas is 0.62, which confirms the good performance of Switzerland in terms of location interoperability. This compares with a European average of 0.55.