Division A Facilitating at Community level access to digital content, its use and exploitation

The activities to be carried out under this line of action encompass the establishment of networks and alliances between stakeholders, encouraging the creation of new services.

Target areas are public sector information, spatial data, learning and cultural content.

Focus will be on:

1. (a)

   supporting a wider recognition of the importance of public sector information (PSI), its commercial value and associated societal implications of its use. Activities shall improve effective cross-border use and exploitation of PSI between public sector organisations and private companies, including SMEs, for added-value information products and services;

2. (b)

   encouraging a wider use of spatial data by public sector bodies, private companies, including SMEs, and citizens through cooperation mechanisms at European level. Activities should tackle both technical and organisational issues, avoiding duplications and underdeveloped territorial data sets. They should promote cross-border interoperability, supporting coordination between mapping agencies and fostering the emergence of new services at European level for mobile users. They should also support the use of open standards;

3. (c)

   fostering the proliferation of open European knowledge pools of digital objects, for education and research communities, as well as the individual. The activities will support the creation of trans-European brokering services for digital learning content, with associated business models. The activities should also encourage the use of open standards, and the creation of large user groups analysing and testing pre-standardisation and specifications schemes with a view to conveying European multilingual and multicultural aspects into the process of definition of global standards for digital learning content;

4. (d)

   promoting the emergence of trans-European information infrastructures for accessing and using high quality European digital cultural and scientific resources through the linking of virtual libraries, community memories, etc. Activities should encompass coordinated approaches to digitisation and collection building, preservation of digital objects and inventories of cultural and scientific digital resources. They should improve access to digital cultural and scientific assets through effective licensing schemes and collective pre-emptive clearing of rights.