At the General Assembly in Iceland 2005 one of the main priorities for the EuroGeographics Strategy was to shift the emphasis from “creating a product” to building an “interoperable infrastructure”.

The fundamental vision for EuroGeographics is to achieve interoperability of the members’ national land and geographic information assets and the mission of the Association is to further the development of the European Spatial Data Infrastructure (ESDI) through collaboration in the area of geographic information, cadastre and land information.

An increasing influence of legislation and policy developments from the EU is recognised, along with developments such as INSPIRE and GMES and there is as well the wider needs for geographic information in the market place.

The aims for the Business Interoperability group are:

• to strengthen the public positioning of the role and value of the NMCAs
• Collectively raise the profile and the importance and value of geographic and land information supporting the ambition of the NMCAs to operate at the heart of their national SDIs and the ESDI.
• to maximise the use of NMCA information within a growing European market and, in the longer term and where appropriate, increase income streams
• to develop and stimulate the market and to develop pan-European products and services in a cost effective and timely manner
• to stimulate the growth of private sector companies, operating across Europe, who wish to ‘add value’ to NMCA data
• to meet the needs from the European Commission for better ‘data sharing’ within initiatives such as INSPIRE
• to monitor new technology including internet/web-based developments and open standards for providing tools to support greater sharing and integration of data and monitor new players using new technology for developing European products and services competing with or complementing National products and services.