Infrastructure Engineering - Theses
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ItemThe governance of Spatial Data Infrastructure: a registry based model( 2013)This research is motivated by the desire to contribute to addressing what is increasingly recognised as a significant challenge to Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) implementation, namely its governance. Governance provides an enabling decision-making and accountability framework within which a community cooperates to achieve collective goals. SDIs which address the goal of sharing, accessing and using geospatial resources are rapidly developing around such communities, based upon interoperability standards and service-oriented architectural patterns. These communities vary greatly in thematic and geographic scope, level of mandate and resources, and technical capacity. With increased social and technical complexities and inter-relatedness of SDI initiatives, the design of effective governance becomes a significant challenge. Despite the recognized importance of SDI governance there is a lack of consensus about key concepts. Furthermore, there has been relatively limited research into SDI governance challenges and potential approaches to addressing them. Without a sound theoretical basis for understanding governance and its priority challenges, it is not possible to develop appropriate, scalable, broadly applicable SDI governance solutions. This thesis describes research undertaken to explore current understandings of SDI governance and its challenges and to develop a model for SDI governance to guide operational responses and inform further research. The research comprised literature review, case study analysis and the development of an SDI governance model. A review was undertaken of governance literature across a range of relevant contexts to explore core concepts and identify principles, patterns or mechanisms that potentially might be applied to SDI governance. This review provided an important foundational conceptual framework for SDI governance. Emerging trends in public governance, such as the recognition of emergent heterarchical governance models, provided important insights, and a deeper understanding of public governance proved useful in framing an understanding of SDI governance which is embedded within, and must effectively interact with, broader governance contexts within which it operates. A review of SDI governance literature made apparent that little attention has been given to exploring or defining the requirements for an SDI governance model. For the purposes of this thesis the SDI governance challenge was articulated from a resource governance perspective. SDI typically comprises complex interacting individually and collectively defined, owned and operated resources. Effective SDI implementation entails ensuring that these resources deliver a coherent set of functions to users. Coherence of resources requires agreement about many different aspects of the resources from policy to operational levels. Thus SDI governance effort needs to focus on addressing geospatial resource cohesion. Given the contested, complex, evolving, subjective, and multi-faceted nature of SDI and its governance, there is tremendous variability in how SDIs are conceptualized in theory and realised in practice. Therefore an exploratory case study approach was used to explore the realities of SDI governance in practice using four Australian case studies. The SDI governance model presented in this thesis is based on governance concepts drawn from other fields, a review of SDI governance literature and analysis of Australian case studies. The model is articulated around the ‘three + one’ dimensions of governance, that is: ‘the who’- stakeholders, ‘the what’ – scope of governance; ‘the how’ – mechanisms, and ‘the when’ – handling change. The model defines the scope of SDI governance in terms of an institutional framework and two distinct decision domains covering social and technical concerns, with the model being focused on the governance of the technical decision domain. This separation of concerns is based on the insight that research into and implementation of SDI governance has to-date focused largely on the institutional arrangements and addressing the needs of the socio-governance domain, i.e. dealing with policy, strategic decisions and the governance environment itself. By contrast, the technical domain is concerned governing agreements about how geospatial resources behave and the realisation of those agreements in terms of geospatial resources such as software components or information resources that actually comprise the SDI. The model represents an integrated socio-technical governance solution, comprising processes, roles and a technical framework to support submission, management and use of agreements (the products from authority structures) and the geospatial resources that implement the agreements. These are based on the ISO 19135 Standard for Registration of Geographic Items which specifies the use of registries, with registration processes and associated roles that enable a community to govern shared information resources. This approach focuses on achieving the interoperability of geospatial resources. This resource-centric approach enables lightweight and scalable governance with effort commensurate with scale of the SDI. Governance of SDI resources is achieved through clearly defined registration processes that capture and maintain detailed metadata about resources. The ability to discover geospatial resources together with the agreements that provide rich metadata about the syntax and semantics of resources will assist in promoting reuse and thus achieving interoperability across SDI initiatives. The ability to federate registers governed within different communities, offers significantly improved prospects for achieving interoperability within and between SDI both horizontally across domains as well as hierarchical aggregation of information resources. This model addresses the complexity of overlapping involvement of stakeholders in multiple roles related to multiple registers in multiple initiatives that exist in practice e.g. an agency in one jurisdiction as member of control body for a thematic SDI in another jurisdiction. The elaboration of governance through the creation and operation of registers represents a formal, top-down hierarchical approach to governance. Assignment of roles for governing and submitting content of registers supports a bottom-up networked community engagement model. Thus the registry based approach enables, rather than precludes, the interaction of complex interwoven network and hierarchical governance mechanisms i.e. it supports heterarchical governance. The model is considered to be a valuable contribution not only to improving the quality of governance but to addressing fundamental underlying challenges that SDI implementation is designed to address i.e. delivering seamless interoperable information resources for end user (re)use across SDI.