The HUMBOLDT project: Towards the harmonisation of spatial information in Europe

The four-year EU project HUMBOLDT (www.esdi-humboldt.eu, 6th Framework Programme) started in October 2006. This paper should not be considered as a scientific publication but as a rough summary of the contents of the HUMBOLDT project. HUMBOLDT aims at contributing to the implementation of a European Spatial Data Infrastructure (ESDI) that integrates the diversity of spatial data available for a multitude of European organisations. The main goal of the HUMBOLDT project is to facilitate the harmonisation of spatial information. The software tools and processes created will support the feasibility and advantages of an Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe as planned by the INSPIRE initiative, meeting the goals of Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES). An essential element of the project is the development of user-driven, cross-border, GMES-related application scenarios in which the different components are applied and tested under realistic conditions. They will use data themes from the INSPIRE Annexes in their use cases and apply INSPIRE Implementing Rules where possible. Moreover, the scenarios are used to provide clear and realistic requirements on the development of software tools and components to support spatial data harmonisation processes. The first two years of HUMBOLDT already led to several major results. Based on the model-driven architecture and approach, a model editor was developed, which aims at the complete and easy specification of data schemas. In accordance to this approach, an alignment editor (tool for the specification of a transformation between source and target model) is currently under development. In addition, a framework was implemented, which supports the search for existing data and transformations according to given information product specifications.