SIGMA TER

SIGMA TER is a Community involving 25 local authorities (Region Emilia-Romagna as coordinator) to create an infrastructure for exchanging and integrating regional cadastral information. This infrastructure is designed to enable the development of new services for private citizens and businesses and to provide support in the use of local property registers and the management of local property taxation. It is widely known, in fact, that the combined use of different spatial data in the management of the territory has an impact on widening the access to public information, enabling a better targeting of policies and services, reducing the costs of data collection and management and freeing resources for a wider service catalogue. This process started spontaneously at different extents in a number of territory all over Europe and dramatically increased in recent years thanks to the diffusion of reliable technologies based on Internet enabling a better interoperability and integration between information systems. Despite that the process is still at the beginning as the technical and socio-economic characteristics of the spatial information make the problems of co-ordination, information gaps, undefined quality and barriers to accessing and using the information particularly acute. In fact the problem regarding the availability, quality, organisation and accessibility of spatial information involves and is common to a large number of policy and information themes and is experienced across the various level of public authority. The strategic relevance of the process and its widespread diffusion prompted for the identification of an European framework for spatial data management through the INfrastructure for SPatial InfoRmation in Europe initiative (INSPIRE) aiming at making available relevant, harmonised and quality geographic information for the purpose of formulation, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of Community policy-making. The services based on the INSPIRE vision should allow the users to identify and access spatial or geographical information from a wide range of sources, from the local level to the global level, in an inter-operable way for a variety of uses. Members of SIGMA TER have already gained experience that can be useful for the future INSPIRE implementation, in particular on the following issues: - the development of a specific multi-platform infrastructure, based on existing land information systems, between different administrative level; - the implementation and publishing of services to access geographic information; - the open management of metadata. SIGMA TER is a national leader on the use of international standards related to GI (ISO19100 serie) and services (W3C, OGC) that allows the cooperation and interoperability between different systems ands data. (the community is also involved into CEN-TC287 Working Group 5 activity - European SDI, through the participation of some members). For more details about SIGMA TER project see section 3.3 – Register a Running Project and the reference materials submitted.