Panel GI, Pan European Link for Geographical Information, project ran from June 1998 until December 2000. EUROGI was a partner.
In the last few years a wide debate has begun among the European Geographical Information Community and various initiatives are in process to create a European Geographical Information Infrastructure (EGII) that was defined as set of agreed rules, standards and procedures for creating, collecting, exchanging and using GI.
In general, a GI infrastructure assumes a working system to exchange data, that requires a technical infrastructure, a set of standards for the exchange and the interpretation of data and organisational arrangements, including economic and legal agreements; the understanding and the adoption of the methods coming out from the GI current trends over a wider community (users, system vendors, developers and integrators, data providers, agencies) is the base for the development of the GIS market.
The PANEL-GI project has been then proposed for constituting a GI European Network working on these issues and aimed at involving partners form the Central and Eastern European Countries (CEEC) in the process of creation of a Pan European GI Forum. The network is considered to give an important contribution to realise in perspective a full and integrated European GI context and to stimulate or enable GI business in CEEC.
The wider goal of the project is to contribute to the establishment of shared foundations for the Information Society in CEEC, in the particular area of GIS.
To act in such direction the Network intends to cover a number of GI issues that make possible to classify the project in a mainstream enclosing keywords as European Geographical Information Infrastructure (EGII), GIS Interoperability and Open GIS, metadata, data availability, GIS applications and European dimension.