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Decision makers' perspectives on European geographic information policy issues
Author(s) -
BURROUGH PETER,
CRAGLIA MASSIMO,
MASSER IAN,
RHIND DAVID
Publication year - 1997
Publication title -
transactions in gis
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.721
H-Index - 63
eISSN - 1467-9671
pISSN - 1361-1682
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9671.1997.tb00005.x
Subject(s) - european union , intellectual property , metadata , data protection act 1998 , business , delphi method , european commission , political science , commission , public relations , public administration , knowledge management , computer science , world wide web , international trade , law , artificial intelligence
The proposals for a European policy framework for Geographic Information (GI) recently put forward by Directorate General XIII raise three sets of issues about measures required to facilitate the dissemination of GI in the European Union: (1)‘hot topics’ such as privacy and the legal protection of databases that apply to information generally; (2) GI issues such as reference data and metadata services that may require action by the European Commission; and (3) perceived barriers to the development of a European GI market. This paper examines the views of 20 experts responsible for the provision and management of GI in key organizations throughout Europe. A Delphi‐style strategy was used to identify the relative importance of the issues raised by the proposals and to ascertain the level of agreement as to the importance of these issues between the experts. The results show that issues relating to copyright, the protection of intellectual property rights, data quality, and data access policies were ranked highly by most of the respondents. A lack of awareness, education, and training (as opposed to the lack of public domain data and metadata services) were viewed as the main barriers to the deveiopment of the GI market in Europe.