From an understanding of European GI economic activity to the reality of a European data set

As the title suggests, this chapter is divided into two parts. The first part considers the nature of the economic sector of geographic information. Many qualitative arguments exist in documents such as GI2000 explaining why investing in the ‘Europeanisation’ of geographic information is so important (CEC, 1996), but very few figures exist showing the size of the sector. Many people think that the GI sector will influence the future of the information technology (IT) field but very few facts (or figures) are available to prove the assertion.