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CERCO-MEGRIN : The Main Building-Block of the European Regional Geographic Information Infrastructure
The General Assembly
The main decisional body
of CERCO is the General Assembly that meets once a year, generally in September.
If a small meeting room was sufficient in the infancy of CERCO, General
Assemblies of today need professional seminar facilities, as they tend to gather
some hundred people for three days. Needless to say that such a big gathering
would not be able to achieve practical results, were they not supported by the
preparatory and organisational work of dedicated persons and
teams.
The Executive
Three elements comprise the executive of
CERCO:
- The President holds office for 2 years and is selected from amongst CERCO’s
Members. The honour is offered in alphabetical order of the countries’ names and
thus France which succeeded Finland will be followed by Ireland; Greece and
Hungary having declined the opportunity.
- The Management Board which comprises the President and his immediate
predecessor or successor plus 3 elected members provides policy direction which
the President and Secretary General then carry out.
- The Secretary General is contracted for a period of 5 or more years. He is
responsible for the administration and co-operation of the activities, the
organisation of the meeting, etc.
The Working Groups
Much of
the work of CERCO is carried out by its Working Groups. These are groups created
on an ad-hoc basis to deal with on-going topics. They are composed of staff from
CERCO members, involving as many as twenty people. CERCO has created a number of
such WG’s over the years:
- Copyright and relations with private sector (now legal and economic affairs)
- Standardisation in digital cartography (1:1,000,000 scale)
- Advisory group to the president
- Carte de la Pollution de la Nappe Phreatique Rhenane
- European Territorial Data Base
- Education and training
- Database specifications for road navigation
- Geodesy and GPS
- Updating databases
- Preliminary work on MEGRIN
- Quality
The evolution of these various groups varies widely, as
does their scope and objectives. WG1, VIII, IX and XI are still active while the
others have either completed their objectives or ae no longer relevant. The
costs involved are mostly covered by the participating NMAs, but a part of CERCO
budget is also reserved to support the WG activities.
In addition CERCO
undertakes Studies and currently these include The Benefits and Usage of
Geographic Information, A survey of NMAs, and the Pros and Cons of Membership
OGC. MEGRIN is often consider as CERCO’s daughter, also as its operational
branch or commercial arm. Actually, as CERCO is the political component of the
NMA contribution to the EGII1, MEGRIN is the component devised for
implementation of decisions taken at that political level. (figure1)
A short history of MEGRIN
The Group Technique Permanent (GTP
in French, Permanent Technical Group in English) was created by CERCO in Paris
in September 1991, in order to start investigating the issues related to
pan-European Geographic Information (GI had already superseded the previous term
of “Cartography).
The initial finding of the GTP were that the creation
of Pan-European datasets by assembling nationally produced GI databases would
not be seriously hindered by technical limitations. Certainly technical
difficulties existed but none for which the solution was perceived as out of
reach. What was regarded as the main issue was the such a pan-European approach
might encroach with the individual national legal frameworks, commercial
policies or organisational structures and mechanisms.
Consequently, it
was decided to create a stronger organisational framework suitable for
addressing those issues.
As a result, the “MEGRIN Group” was created in
Helsinki (Finland) on 15th June 1993 with the signing by 17 CERCO members of a
Memorandum of Understanding. However, its legal identity was still considered
too loose for its intended objectives, and a new step was made by registering
MEGRIN as a GIE (Groupement d’ Internet Economique) under French Law in
September 1995 with the signing of the GIE agreement in Budapest.
The GIE
MEGRIN of 1999 counts nineteen full members, and it is expected that several
other CERCO members convinced of its benefit, will also join MEGRIN by the year
2000.
Membership
Members of MEGRIN need to be firstly CERCO
members. All CERCO members and observers are by default MEGRIN observers. To
become an active MEGRIN member, with full voting rights, an organisation has to
sign the Gie Agreement, and to pay an annual fee. They are defined after a
formula involving each country’s GNP. This results in a much greater diversity
of contributions than is the case for CERCO subscriptions.
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