DS GISCO > Initiatives - EN

The main goal of GISCO's various activities and long-term projects is to better integrate statistical and geospatial information at EU level.

UN-Global geospatial information management (UN-GGIM)

Eurostat is closely involved in the activities of the UN-Global geospatial information management and its European committee, UN-GGIM: Europe. Eurostat's main interest in UN-GGIM lies in bringing together statistical and geospatial information.

The aim is to provide better, more relevant statistics. In line with this, Eurostat is keen to raise awareness among European Statistical System (ESS) members of the benefits of data integration. UN-GGIM's activities now provide the framework for all location-related ESS activities.

GEOSTAT and the activities of the European forum for geography and statistics (EFGS)

The GEOSTAT initiative was launched in early 2010, in cooperation with the European forum for geography and statistics. It comprises a series of projects designed to set up geospatial statistics infrastructure in EU countries and at EU level, to promote grid-based statistics and, more generally, to work towards the integration of statistical and geospatial information in a common information infrastructure for the EU.

This initiative has been defined and designed through a series of ESSnet projects, GEOSTAT 1 to 4, which produced guidelines for the collection and production of spatial and grid statistics within the ESS, and created the methodological foundations for European grid datasets.

The outcomes of the GEOSTAT initiative include:

  • the GEOSTAT 2011 grid dataset, which contains national population grid information from 29 EU and EFTA countries;
  • a manual on how to create population grids from statistical information using aggregation or disaggregation techniques, including good practices;
  • the European version of the global statistical geospatial framework (GSGF) for the ESS: the GSGF-Europe.

The infrastructure is expected to become an integral part of the ESS's existing statistical data infrastructure. The idea is to incorporate the production of geospatial statistics into the various phases of the generic statistical business process model, which provides the framework to produce official statistics.

In that context, GEOSTAT helped and supported national statistical institutes in setting up their data, methods, and production systems, in particular to achieve a fully geocoded 2021 population census.

Another GEOSTAT aim was community and capacity building. The two most visible elements of this are the annual European forum for geography and statistics conference and website.

For more detailed information on the different GEOSTAT projects, please refer to the EFGS website.

Merging statistics and geospatial information

Following the recommendation of the ESS for closer cooperation on geospatial information, in 2012 Eurostat launched a series of annual calls for proposals for projects on the integration of statistical and geospatial information. Complementing the research-oriented GEOSTAT projects, these calls for proposals were intended to cover a wider range of more operational topics within national statistical institutes.

In most countries, mapping and cadastral authorities and statistical offices were already cooperating to varying degrees. However, the aim here was to further develop common approaches and synergies. Integrating geographical and statistical information offers significant opportunities to maximise the utility of data collected for statistical purposes. Key phenomena that need to be precisely understood at local level also need to be more accurately measured, analysed and communicated. This in turn will make it possible to better create and monitor policy initiatives. Several strategy initiatives and policies of the EU (e.g. regional/cohesion policy, green deal, common agricultural policy / common fisheries policy) contain many aspects that require information at a local level of relevance.

The 2020 vision of the European statistical system states that ‘there is a growing need to develop statistics with increasing geographical detail to support national and regional policy making’. Statistics with greater geographical detail are needed, for example, in the development, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of EU policies.

European statistics make an essential contribution to building the information capacity required to support the EU's strategic objectives and their underlying policies and supporting instruments. Geographic information, used in combination with statistics and new data sources such as big data, can make a substantial contribution to meeting this objective, in particular for social and environmental information.

Action taken in recent years includes:

  • geo-referencing of official registers and administrative data used for statistics, to achieve better linkage between and integration of statistics and geography
  • evaluation of big data and linked data for statistical production
  • exploring the use of earth observation data from the EU Copernicus programme for statistics.

Examples of official registers used for statistical purposes include address registers, registers of people, farm registers, tax registers and business registers.

Further readings