Developments in Europe

European Union programmes, policies and directives

• GMES: Global Monitoring for Environment and Security, the joint initiative of the European Commission and the European Space Agency, designed to establish a European capacity for the provision and use of operational information for Global Monitoring of Environment and Security.

• INSPIRE: Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe, an initiative launched by the European Commission, to make available relevant, harmonised and quality geographic information to support formulation, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of Community policies with a territorial dimension or impact.

• PSI: Public Sector Information, the directive to establish a minimum set of rules governing the commercial and non-commercial exploitation of existing information held by the public sector.

• WFD: the Water Framework Directive published by the European Commission in October 2000, to control and protect the quality of all water bodies in Europe.

• Galileo: Galileo will be Europe's own global navigation satellite system, providing highly accurate, guaranteed global positioning services under civilian control. It will be interoperable with GPS and Glonass, the two other global satellite navigation systems.

Tracking Fact-sheets