In: Annoni, Alessandro; Luzet, Claude; Gubler Erich u.a. (Hrsg.):
Map Projections for Europe.
European Communities 2003. (=2001. EUR 20120 EN)
S. 72-75.

The European Commission organised already two workshops on coordinate reference systems. The first one held in November 1999 dealt on geodetic reference systems, the second one held in December 2000 dealt on map projections. This shows the importance of the topic not only for scientists, engineers, technologists, but also for users and politicians.

Coordinate reference systems are the mathematical fundamentals for geospatial management. Their integration into digital geomatic tools like GIS and for remote sensing tasks, navigation applications and computer-aided cartography is a must. And there is also an ongoing process on harmonisation, normalisation and coordination. [see e.g. Voser 1998, Voser 2000].

In the past, most of the different types of coordinate reference systems were treated separately, and only few experts were aware of the complexity of their handling and the relationships among them. A user of geospatial information only was confronted with the topic when making measurements from maps.

Nowadays, every user of digital geospatial information should be aware on coordinate reference systems, their importance for understanding coordinates describing geospatial locations as well as the handling of the coordinate reference system management. Here still is a big lack, and also its integration into geospatial tools is insufficient or not user-friendly, or the knowledge to identify the correct coordinate reference system instance makes problems because of missing information or knowledge.