Soil forms the basis of food production, water filtration, and carbon storage, all vital components to our life on earth. Despite this importance, soil has remained one of Europe's least protected natural resources. Unlike for air<\/a> and water,<\/a> there was \u2013 until recently \u2013 no binding EU-wide law that required soil to be monitored.<\/p>\n Our soils are often in poor condition. The EU Soil Strategy for 2030<\/a> estimates that 60\u201370% of European soils are currently in an unhealthy state, degraded by erosion, compaction, sealing, organic carbon loss, salinization, and contamination.<\/p>\n The new Soil Monitoring Law (Directive (EU) 2025\/2360 of 12 November 2025)<\/a> aims to close that gap and provide a solid foundation for policies that conserve or improve soil health.<\/p>\n However, this monitoring law is only going to be as strong as the data behind it, and today's soil data sits scattered across incompatible formats. National surveys, regional monitoring networks, and research projects each record the same types of information, such as soil profiles, in their own schema.<\/p>\n A key part in ensuring that both the EU Soil Strategy for 2030 and the Soil Monitoring Law can be implemented efficiently is the EU Soil Observatory (EUSO)<\/a>, an infrastructure managed and developed by the JRC<\/a> that collects relevant data. To make that feasible, the Horizon Europe project SoilWise<\/a> has developed tools to improve the discovery, access, and use of soil data. These tools are made available to the community as Free and Open Source Software.<\/p>\n When data is as fragmented as it is in the soil domain, interoperability is central. SoilWise's solution to providing sufficient interoperability isn't to ask everyone to switch to a single format. Instead, the project is developing the SoilWise Soil Data Suite: <\/strong>a set of formats and converters, all grounded in one common conceptual model. That model is GloSIS (FAO's Global Soil Information System, derived from ISO 28258)<\/a>, underpinned by the Observations, Measurements and Samples standard (OMS, ISO 19156:2023). Datasets can be mapped to this shared model and exposed in the formats their users need, regardless of their source format.<\/p>\n The example dataset of CREA,<\/a> the Italian Council for Agricultural Research and Economics, for instance, lives in the SoilWise GeoPackage.<\/a> This is a natural fit for structured spatial fieldwork, but it's only one of several formats in that suite:<\/p>\n Making all of these formats interoperable in an efficient manner requires converters between them, all built on the common conceptual model.<\/p>\n\n