The Dutch- and German-speaking Division of the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN) and the German Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (BKG) initiated the EuroGeoNames (EGN) project. It aims at establishing a European geographical names infrastructure and supporting services under the umbrella of EuroGeographics by connecting the existing national data sources of the NMCAs and other relevant organisations. The geographical names data will be updated in a consistent way and maintained at the source level by the responsible organisations. Hence, EGN will neither affect the independence or the organization nor the responsibility of the national agencies that produce and maintain geographical names repositories.
The EuroGeoNames project will be targeted primarily at value added resellers (VARs) and service providers to develop specific applications for their customers and deploy value-added GIS products by using the EGN Web Service.
EGN will also capitalise on the knowledge of European geographical names experts with respect to using authoritative geographical names context sensitively and appropriately. Sometimes wider political issues are related to them and almost always, linguistic issues have to be taken into account e.g. main and minority languages, pronunciation etc.
Thus, a full-blown distributed multilingual geographical names data infrastructure for Europe will help to promote cultural diversity and multilingualism.

Project’s objectives
The main objectives for the EGN infrastructure and services proposal are:

• Aggregation of existing European public sector geographical names information in order to provide harmonized access to a multilingual pan-European data infrastructure for the citizen, governance and value-added services.
• Increased availability and usability of authoritative national geographical names data.
• Increased re-use of geographical names in spatially related decision-making processes.
• Increased re-use and value-adding by commercial enterprises.
• Support of all officially recognized minority languages (where data is available and applicable).
• Development of a network of geographical names experts.
• Easy and rapid linkage of exonyms with their corresponding endonyms and vice versa.
• Stimulation of European National Mapping and Cadastral Agencies towards better integration of geographical names data into national SDIs.
• Gain cost efficiencies in the collection, handling, storing, maintenance and distribution of geographical names data.
• Development of an implementation plan for continuing and extending the service beyond the end of the project.

Proposed solution
The EGN consortium proposes to address the current deficiencies within Europe with respect to the management and exploitation of geographical names resources by the following means.

• EGN will establish a European infrastructure of geographical names data sources and setup an interoperable Web (Gazetteer) Service compliant to open standards (specifically OGC standards). The network of the geographical names sources will be based on a harmonised data model. Access will be provided by a Web Feature Service (WFS) interface implemented at each data provider’s database. A reference Web Service will access these distributed WFS to query the EGN data network and return standardised result sets to the inquirer. Single searches for geographical names within the EGN Web Service will be free of charge.
• Pragmatically, the project will aim at connecting 5 to 10 national databases to the EGN infrastructure over the project duration and one year thereafter. The EGN Web Service will enable names searches using all official European languages (at minimum the languages in use in all participating countries – including the officially recognized minority languages where such data is available and applicable).
• Apart from the EGN Web Service, a Web GIS reference application will also be developed, showcasing a graphic user interface for names searches and for the visualization of the search results. EuroGeographics or another competent consortia member will host this application for the project duration (and foreseeably beyond).
• The proposed infrastructure will likewise enlarge the availability and accessibility of multilingual geographical names data by providing tools to commercial companies and other organizations. It is anticipated that they will develop specific applications for their customers and deploy value-added GIS products using the EGN Web Service. An example of an operational Web GIS application in a commercial context will be delivered within the project.
• EGN will also actively encourage and engage with those non-participating NMCAs in order to better integrate geographical names data within national SDIs and in the European SDI, by acting as an exemplar of best practice and by providing a sound data model.
• EGN is furthermore recognized as a constituent project of the EuroGeographics EuroSpec programme, aiming at full interoperability of Reference Information across Europe. It will be linked with the EuroGeographics products EuroGlobalMap (EGM), EuroRegionalMap (ERM) and Seamless Administrative Boundaries of Europe (SABE). By that, EGN will provide an essential bench mark by which geographical names in these related products may be gauged and act as the reference against which multilingual content in them may be assessed. In the longer term EuroGeoNames will be part of the large scale European Reference Information Infrastructure, a major building block of the ESDI, that will be developed in accordance with the principle and concepts of the INSPIRE Directive.
  

In essence such a service may be regarded as middleware providing machine-to-machine as well as human-to-machine interfaces for interrogating and retrieving geographical names data. The human-to-machine interface could be a stand-alone application, an applet running inside an Internet browser, or a custom Web service itself, e.g., interested parties such as tourism agencies, EuroGeographics, or even Google may want to integrate the EGN Web Service within their Internet pages for improving them (see Figure – Example of a possible service architecture and data flow).
Additionally, all commercial companies involved in the EGN project may explore revenue creation options, an element of which would flow back to the data providers as further enticement for participation.

Generally, the setup of the EGN infrastructure shall follow a phased approach. In a first phase, data selection will focus on geographical names data from data providers at small/medium scales (1:1 million, 1:250,000, 1:100,000 – this being a trade-off between being too detailed and not detailed enough). In general this includes names of all administrative units and settlements at communal level as well as of all hydrographic features relevant for the requirements of the Water Framework Directive and of other geographic features. If applicable, data available in the participating countries at scales 1:50,000 or larger shall be considered. This target is in line with the INSPIRE time-table for implementing the European Spatial Data Infrastructure (ESDI).

EuroGeoNames specifications, architecture and implementation will aim at being consistent with the guidelines for data harmonisation and specifications to be developed by INSPIRE and the EuroSpec initiative of EuroGeographics itself. This will ensure that an element of future-proofing is explicitly built-in to the project.

The EuroGeoNames Consortium

• BKG, Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy, Germany (DE)
• UU, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands (NL)
• BEV, Bundesamt für Eich- und Vermessungswesen, Austria (AT)
• SMA, Surveying and Mapping Authority of the Republic of Slovenia, Slovenia (SI)
• EGHO, EuroGeographics (Head Office), France (FR)
• UEDIN, EDINA National Datacentre, University of Edinburgh (United Kingdom)
• Geodan, Geodan Holding, The Netherlands (NL)
• GeoTask, GeoTask AG, Germany (DE)
• ESRI, ESRI Geoinformatik GmbH, Germany (DE)