ACCURATE DECISIONS NEED CORRECT GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION
The leaflet of GIS in Business '94 indicates "you can use
GIS to revolutionize the way you do business". Indeed,
GIS have great potential in improving the decision-making
process for many businesses: GIS users know that a GIS
transforms piles of documents and tapes of company data
into useful strategic information that is easily accessible
through clear graphic presentations.
The improved clarity of the business information leads to faster and more accurate decision making. However, to achieve an accurate GIS that indeed broadens today's horizons, the GIS has to be fuelled with correct and up-to-date geographical information. Highways, streets, railways, rivers and administrative boundaries have to form a dense, up-to-date and correct framework on to which the company information can be hooked. A correct framework enables correct results to be generated by the GIS and hence assures correct decisions to be taken by management.
EUROPEAN COMPANIES NEED UNIFORM GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION
On the other hand, today's enterprises cannot negate the
importance of a European market approach. Even if
today's business is only regional, one should always bear
in mind that a European scale could be needed in the
near future. When using a GIS to improve the decision
making process, it is important to be sure that the GIS will
be able to grow at the same pace as the company does.
Therefore the GIS must use geographical information that
allows a smooth path of growth from today's local
approach to tomorrow's European market coverage. Only
if the geographic information of every region in Europe is
defined in a uniform way can this growth path
technologically be assured.
THE EUROPEAN DIGITAL ROAD MAP ASSOCIATION
Recently, three industry leaders -- Robert Bosch GmbH,
Etak Inc. and Tele Atlas BV -- have joined forces in the
European Digital Road Map Association (EDRA), a
consortium set up to accelerate the completion and
market availability of the uniform European digital road
map. For several years, specialists at Bosch, Etak and
Tele Atlas have been digitizing major regions of Europe.
The result of this important work is a set of high-quality street databases, each of a particular region in Europe. These street databases contain all necessary geographic information useful in a variety of GIS applications. By now defining a common database framework, all members of the EDRA have been able to line up their street databases into the largest uniform European road map available on the market. Moreover, by joining forces all members have gained the required momentum to complete the entire European road map and to guarantee a continuing quality and coverage. In this way, GIS users will be provided with correct geographic information for accurate decisions and with uniform European data to ensure a smooth path of growth to the future.
EDRA'S SEVERE SPECIFICATIONS
The EDRA commitment formally specifies a common
standard database framework, which is the foundation of
the uniform digital road map. By signing this commitment,
all partners agreed on the common data format, the
geographical coverage, the complete contents and a
certification process to guarantee street map quality.
Moreover, as an extra guarantee to the customers, the
commitment includes severe penalties in case of
non-accomplishment.
EDRA is now finalizing road-map coverage to incorporate the entire EC plus many European countries and states of economic value such as Austria, Greece, Liechtenstein, the Scandinavian countries and Switzerland. The centerline street databases (1/10,000 or better) include nearly all streets, rivers, railways and administrative boundaries of all these countries. Additionally, many attributes contain all required administrative data as well as information on traffic, transport and land usage. The EDRA commitment enforces all partners to fill their streetmap databases with geographic information precisely as was stated in the EDRA specifications.
The commitment also specifies data format conformity to the European standard called Geographic Data Files (GDF), this way assuring the availability of the databases to several GIS applications in various types of industries. The GDF 2.0 standard is a result of the work at the Task Force European Digital Road Map (TFEDRM), an EC supported project in which Robert Bosch (D), Daimler-Benz (D), Intergraph (NL), Philips (NL), Tele Atlas (NL) and Sagem (F) took part in 1989. To continue the standardization activities, in 1991 a follow-up project was started called the "European Digital Road Map 2". During this project the Centre Europ=E9en de Normalisation (CEN) became strongly interested, which will eventually lead to GDF being an official European CEN-standard.
EDRA'S QUALITY CERTIFICATE
Owing to the high quality of the existing efforts of every
EDRA member, it was easy to define a common quality
standard on completeness, correctness, up-to-dateness
and accuracy. EDRA specifies quantitative and
measurable criteria that will assure a high-quality level
over the life of the data.
Before releasing a street database to the market, each EDRA member has now to submit its work to the EDRA's Central Data Pool Administration (CDPA) that will control the quality and the uniformity of the data and assign a certificate to it when results are positive. This certificate, and the quality it signifies, is of the utmost importance to the succes of any GIS application. At the same time, the independence of the EDRA members guarantees a continuing effort to safeguard and improve upon the quality of the geographic databases.
BOOSTING GIS
The availability of uniform European geographical
information of a certified high quality will strongly
encourage the expansion of GIS applications on a
European scale. Application suppliers can start
development in a small test region. The uniformity of the
data guarantees the commercialization of the application
on a pan-European scale without alterations. The strong
commitment of all EDRA members will assure an
up-to-date road map, including an upgrade program that
retains an application's commercial value.
The open database structure furthermore enables the addition of specific customer-driven information, giving rise to a wide variety of new and powerful applications. As a conclusion one can surely say that with EDRA's European digital road map, GIS is now ready for Europe.