Archiving of Geodata

In the federal legislation the Archiving Act (ArcA) and the Geoinformation Act (GeoIA) oblige to the archiving of geodata. Therefore the intent of the Swiss Federal Office of Topography (swisstopo) and the Swiss Federal Archives (SFA) is to develop a solution for the archiving of geodata in order to implement the applicable legislation governing geoinformation.

The main aims are as follows:

• The solution should not be specific to swisstopo, but should be developed for the entire federal administration
• A well-founded integral solution needs to be established for archiving and securing the long-term availability of geodata
• The solution must permit archived digital geodata to be (subsequently) reintegrated into the geographic information system and therefore enable to restore and interpret geoinformation at a later date January

2009 to November 2010 the SFA and swisstopo carried out jointly a preliminary study working out first basics and findings concerning the archiving of geodata. The results of this preliminary study are documented in the report Archivierung von Geodaten (available in German and French).

Project Ellipse

In January 2011 the Project Ellipse was launched. It's goal is to concretise the findings of the preliminary study: The basics for the archiving of geodata will be defined and the practical approach to archiving will be given a concrete, professional, organisational and technical frame.
In the project Ellipse (as it was the case with the preliminary study) different Stakeholders will be involved in the drafting of the solutions (a team of observers, other producers of geodata, archives and so on) in order to come up with a broadly based solution.

If you have any inputs, want more information, are interested in joining our team or if you would like to know when the next geodata specific event takes place, please do not hesitate to contact the Competence centre Base data for Environmental Monitoring.