The GETIS team set up a Working Group (WG) that brought together experts and users in different areas (authorities, land registry organizations, transport, disaster management, etc). The users form a user community that provides practical experience and needs to the WG. The WG has been monitoring and guiding the GETIS team through the stages of the project and working to end up with selected data, solutions and an analysis of the process. The Working Group has been, and will continue, communicating via e-mail reflectors in the course of the project and its members have already have and will meet periodically with the GETIS team to discuss results and draw on experiences to move forward.

The WG is monitoring and guiding the GETIS Team through the stages of the project to ensure that the chosen approach and resulting information is closely tied to the requirements of end-users at the various stages of their workflow.
 
Periodical meetings have been held with the GETIS Team to discuss results and draw on experiences to move forward: developing use case scenarios with the Members of the Working Group based on real world disaster events, such as flooding, earthquakes or an oil tanker grounding has provided the foundations for the analysis of required information, related data sets and the underlying it infrastructure. 
 
The GETIS Team reviewed the current set-ups to identify potential room for improvement and further discussion of available options with the Working Group Members has led to the GETIS recommendation on an interoperable information services framework, which is explained in more detail in the report 'Information Requirements and Data Strategy', available in the download section of the GETIS website.

In a nutshell, the framework proposal shows a way forward to upgrade isolated, proprietary data storage and processing systems to interoperable nodes on an informtion network, which will serve end-users and their information requirements much more efficiently by cutting out the currently massive data export and translation efforts linked to 'information exchange activities' as soon as different systems with different data structures are involved.
 
A key objective, again driven by the Working Group, is to ensure that the recommendations out of GETIS can be implemented by using Standards-based Commercial of The Shelf (SCOTS) software components, relying on international standards adopted by industry and user groups, such as OGC, ISO or W3C.

To see short profiles of the working group of users and experts, click HERE.