Context
The current lack of an integrated national cadastre and detailed forestry and rural maps, result to the impairment in entrepreneurship since the use of land is not clearly documented. Similarly, the nearly non-existence of geospatial data contributes to the environmental damage due to the unregulated construction which encourages encroachment of public land. All the above lead to environmental damage. There are laws such as the 3882/2010 which states that public sector data should be available at no cost. However, these laws are often not applied, or they are misunderstood, thereby undermining the free provision of data. The legislative framework has many issues to be settled:
1. We need to define the ownership of the data sets;
2. We need to determine the open data license;
3. We need to determine issues about privacy and confidentiality for the provided data sets.
A major emerging issue is the coordination and control structures for the management / provision of open geospatial data. Additional reasons include the scattering of the data, the lack of an official record in a central registry, and the low quality of the data.
As far as the existing data sets are concerned, some problems arise: a) there are major incompatibilities between the data sets, b) they have many errors, c) no update process exists, d) there is no clear process for validation. The process of compiling the data sets does not follow some standard process and format, acceptable to all stakeholders. It is fragmentary and leads to minimal provision of interoperability services.
Commitment description
The Ministry of Environment, Energy and Climate Change will be responsible for the coordination of the provision of geospatial data from all public administration bodies. The providers will produce and manage their geospatial data and then provide the data to the Ministry, who in turn will make it available in designated format (e.g., oversized paper maps or data sets). Therefore, it is especially important to tag the geospatial data records with appropriate metadata, so that the records can be easily accessed, retrieved and combined with other data sources.
For this purpose, the Ministry of Environment, Energy and Climate Change will prepare all the necessary legislative acts and it will define a specific business process for the provision of data. The provided geospatial data will be publicized through the website of the National Geospatial Information Infrastructure following technical standards and procedures to be established. Also the data will be posted on the Central Governmental registry data.gov.gr.
OGP values
Access to information, Accountability.
Implementing bodies
Ministry of Environment, Energy and Climate Change in cooperation with the Ministry of Infrastructure, Transport and Networks, Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Administrative Reform and e-Governance.
Objectives
Establish a mechanism with which the Ministry of Environment will provide easy and convenient ways to locate, access and share geospatial data. Data will be provided and used by Public Administration in an open and editable format, and according to interoperability standards as defined under Directive 2007/2/EC and by the National Interoperability Framework geo-information and Services.
Until the construction of the geospatial registry and in accordance with Directive 2007/2/EC and Law N.3882/2010, every geospatial provider should provide their geospatial data open. Until the adoption of institutional rules implementing under Law N.3882/2010, public authorities producing and managing geospatial data can not restrict access to them. The rules of access and use shall be in accordance with national and Community legislation. The conditions that must be met to achieve this objective are the following:
• Determination of the licenses (e.g. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International) for the provision of open geospatial data and metadata.
• Determination of the shape of metadata describing the open geospatial data.
• Procedures for the initial posting and updating of geospatial data and metadata by the geospatial data provider.
• Procedures for the extraction and cleansing of geospatial data for publication.
• Coordination of the provision process of open geospatial data.
• Training of governmental executives.
Means for implementation
The operational coordination of the geospatial providers of Public Administration will be undertaken by the Ministry of Environment, Energy and Climate Change, involving pertaining institutions. In particular, the Ministry of Environment, Energy and Climate Change will be responsible to inform government organizations on their obligation to provide open geospatial data, and it will also provide solutions on the issues of open data licenses and metadata schemata.
The provision of open geospatial data will require the creation of a central repository. Details regarding the technical management and business support of the repository will be determined in due course. Furthermore the geospatial data providers will have to be identified, and the issues of metadata generation, publication and the update process, export / cleansing / processing and its provision via web services will have to be addressed as well.
Milestones – Timescales
The exact action plan depends on the roadmap of Directive 2007/2/EC implementation and it will have to be completed by June 2016. During the consultation processes for the development of the current action plan, critical geospatial data sets have been identified. Indicative list:
• Provide geospatial registry the set of ortho-photos and any other cartographic backgrounds of EKCHA SA (formerly Cadastre SA).
• Convert and provide OKXE SA archive in digital format.
• Provide data on environmental protection areas (Natura, etc.).