A Spatial Data Infrastructure for the Monitoring and Management of World Heritage Sites

The management and monitoring of World Heritage Sites represents a considerable challenge for the future of the planet, both for the member states, in particular for poorer countries, as well as for UNESCO.

In March 2007, the French Space Agency (CNES) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) signed an agreement through which CNES joined the ‘Open Initiative From Space to Place,‘ headed by the European Space Agency and UNESCO. The initiative invites space agencies, space research institutions, and universities to work jointly to bring to developing countries the benefits of space technologies as applied to the conservation, monitoring, and documentation of the prestigious World Heritage Sites. This paper illustrates the contributions of CNES and its partners to this initiative.

Management and monitoring both depend on reliable access to current information so that the tools and methods of intervention remain pertinent to existing conditions. However, the multitude of actors intervening on these protected areas, from local managers to international organizations passing through researchers and non-governmental organizations, produce and use a wide body of disparate information. Lack of knowledge of the information resources available can even lead to the redundant collection of similar data causing a costly loss of efficiency.

To improve the widespread knowledge of existing resources and to provide ready access to those data, CNES joined the French Institute for Research on Development (IRD) and the private company Geomatys to develop and propose to UNESCO a web based, spatial data infrastructure designed for the needs of the World Heritage Sites. This information system focuses on collaborative aspects of information aggregation and distribution, enabling each contributor to leverage and share with all other actors concerned, data and results related to these zones of global importance.

The technological components of this information system were selected to foster interoperability. The system therefore rests on the international standards for spatial data definition and exchange developed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). Beyond simply building the information system, this work has also led to the production of software implementations of newer standards, such as the recently published standard for metadata related to imagery, ISO 19115-2, and to work on developing new standards, such as the upcoming Web Map Tiling Service (WMTS) standard of the OGC focused on the efficient delivery of cartographic and imagery data over the World Wide Web.