Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) are a key asset for Europe. This paper concentrates on unsolved issues in SDIs in Europe related to the management of semantic heterogeneities. It studies contributions and competences from two communities in this field: cartographers, authoritative data providers, and geographic information scientists on the one hand, and computer scientists working on the Web of Data on the other. During several workshops organized by the EuroSDR and Eurogeographics organizations, the authors analyzed their complementarity and discovered reasons for the difficult collaboration between these communities. They have different and sometimes conflicting perspectives on what successful SDIs should look like, as well as on priorities. We developed a proposal to integrate both perspectives, which is centered on the elaboration of an open European Geographical Knowledge Graph. Its structure reuses results from the literature on geographical information ontologies. It is associated with a multifaceted roadmap addressing interrelated aspects of SDIs.

This article addresses the integration of cultural perspectives in the smart city discourse and in the implementation of the UN Agenda 2030; it does so specifically with respect to land patterns and land use. We hope to increase the ability of relevant stakeholders, including scientific communities working in that field, to handle the complexity of the current urban challenges. Culture is understood here in the broadest sense of the word, including the values and conceptualizations of the world, and the modes of technological creation and control of the environment. This concept of culture varies among stakeholders, depending, in particular, on their activities, on the place they live in, and also depending on their scientific background. We propose to complement existing targets that are explicitly related to culture in the UN and UNESCO agendas for 2030, and introduce a target of culture awareness for city information infrastructures. We show that, in the specific case of land patterns and land use, these new targets can be approached with historical data. Our analysis of the related core functionalities is based on interviews with practitioners, draws on insights from the humanities, and takes into account the readiness of the existing technologies.