The Ellipse project

The Ellipse project developed a concept for archiving official geodata. The concept describes the fundamentals for archiving geodata along the process chain from production through to geodata management, conservation and archiving planning, acquisition (into the archive), preservation and use. The main emphasis here was the collaboration between the producers of geodata and the SFA. In accordance with the legislation governing geoinformation, these institutions are required to mutually secure the availability of geodata over the long term. A great deal of importance was attached to cooperation with cantons and specialist organisations within both the archiving and the geoinformation communities.

Goals of the project were:

• To develop an integrated solution for all official federal geodata
• To improve the long-term availability and archiving of federal geodata
• To allow geoinformation to be restored and interpreted from archived geodata at a later date

National activities

Based on the Ellipse concept, the cantons and municipalities have produced studies and concepts for the long-term availability and archiving of their geodata.

• Study on the long-term availability and archiving of geodata
  The GIS work group of the Swiss Conference on Information Technology (SIK-GIS) has produced a study on the long-term availability and archiving of geodata for coordinated implementation at the federal, cantonal and municipal levels. The study was published in January 2015
  
• Concept for the historicisation, long-term availability and archiving of data in the official cadastral survey
  The board of the conference of the cantonal cadastre services (CadastreSuisse) and the Federal Directorate of Cadastral Surveying (FDCS) have developed a concept for the historicisation, long-term availability and archiving of data in the official cadastral survey. This document was published in January 2015

International activities

The activities within the scope of the Ellipse project also attracted a great deal of interest throughout Europe, and have been presented at a variety of events.