ISSUES OF MULTILINGUALITY IN CREATING A EUROPEAN SDI - THE PERSPECTIVE FOR SPATIAL DATA INTEROPERABILITY

In July 2004 the INSPIRE Proposal for a Directive was adopted by the Commission, aiming to establish an Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe. The first thematic application domain that INSPIRE will address is environment and in such a context an efficient implementation and monitoring of environmental policies requires interoperable spatial information across national borders and streamlined access and use of this information by all concerned stakeholders. Shared understanding between independently developed heterogeneous geospatial databases applications is not a new problem. In the European context, however, the development of a Spatial Data Infrastructure must embark the issue of multilinguality, which increases the complexity of facilitating the interoperability of such data. This paper identifies the different aspects where multilinguality may influence the development of a European Spatial Data Infrastructure.