Location data is fundamental to people and organisations and is used to deliver 
value in combination with other data about services, contacts or objects (data from the Internet of Things). For public administrations, location intelligence will become mainstream in digital government in 2 to 5 years.
This context - growing in ambition - is further challenged by the need for interoperability supporting these services across Europe, the importance of government-validated geospatial data (core location data) in the legal context of digital government services and the other various potential sources of geospatial data which will emerge from different sectors.
The European Union Location Framework (EULF) project, which was part of the Interoperability Solutions for Public Administrations (ISA) programme took action to tackle these challenges.
The EULF vision is to create and promote a coherent European framework of guidance and actions to foster cross-sector and cross-border interoperability and use of location information in digital public services, building on the INSPIRE , and resulting in more effective services, savings in time and money, and contributing to increased growth.
The EULF Blueprint is a guidance framework for a wide audience to implement the EULF vision.
This updated version (v2.0) has been produced by the European Location Interoperability Solutions for e-Government (ELISE) project, which is part of the ISA2 programme.
ELISE merges and extends the work of the two previous geospatial actions under ISA, namely EULF and ARE3NA, drawing together the policy-related work of EULF and the work on reusable INSPIRE solutions from ARE3NA.
The intended audience of the document is wide, it targets six types of readers: the Policy Maker, the Digital Public Service Owner, Manager or Implementer, the ICT Manager or Developer, the Data Manager or Data Scientist, the INSPIRE Data Publisher, and the Private Sector Product and Service Entrepreneur / Developer.
There are 5 focus areas identified in the EULF Vision, presented in the Figure below.
The EULF Blueprint is organised as follows: for each focus area, the ‘current state’ assessment and ‘vision’ are outlined.
The key points for progressing from the current state to the vision are then expanded into a series of 19 recommendations, each describing the rationale for following the recommendation and the expected benefits (why?), a checklist of associated actions (how?), potential problem areas to address in implementing the recommendation (challenges), and a variety of best practices across Europe where this has been done successfully.
The annexes complement this actionable framework with detailed descriptions of the best practices, guidance for the reader through a role-based discovery of the relevant recommendations, and a long list of further reading, from contextual documentation to concrete toolboxes.
A series of separate guidance documents complement the Framework and provide more detailed guidelines, methodologies and/or good practices with regard to these topics.
The recommendations refer to these guidance documents. While the EULF Blueprint is targeted at decision makers and project managers at EU and national levels, the Guidance documents and tools are especially relevant for project managers and practitioners.