EuroGeographics has since the beginning of year 2000 been involved in a new EC funded project aimed at bringing together many of the key stakeholders involved in European GI in order to both explore and promote the main issues that lie behind the creation of a European Geographic Information Infrastructure. The project is called ETeMII - European Territorial Management Information Infrastructure.
Working within the three headings of "user requirements", "solutions analysis", and "plans for future actions" the project will look at the following key elements:

Metadata: through workshops and other awareness activities, the aim is to build upon existing initiatives and to reach consensus on the way to meet user's needs. A particular focus will be given to semantics and the use of multiple interoperable thesauri to record the multi-cultural and multi-lingual characteristics of the European Information Society.

Standards and interoperability: the work will attempt to seek interoperability standards requirements, and to raise awareness of existing, but possibly incomplete, standards activities.

Reference data: The objective is to reach a European and global (GSDI) technical consensus on the definition of reference data and to explore ways to make them available at affordable cost.

More information can be found at: http://www.ec-gis.org/etemii/