Infrastructure Engineering - Research Publications
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ItemWorldwide (status, development and) impact assessment of geoportals( 2005)At this moment, numerous (catalogue) geoportals have been established and it is expected that many more geoportals will be implemented in the future. To the best of our knowledge, not many status, development and impact assessment studies have been performed with regard to all these initiatives (certainly not on a worldwide scale). It is very important to know what the main developments and impacts of these facilities are to justify all costs, efforts and time to implement these geoportals and to improve their effectiveness and efficiency. For this reason, a survey was undertaken (November 2003 - April 2004) in order to assess the worldwide (status, developments and) impacts. The survey consisted of 21questions and was sent to all known geoportal coordinators. In total 428 coordinators were contacted. 105 coordinators completed the survey. They were mainly coordinating international, national/federal and state geoportals in Europe, Australia and USA/Canada (only a few were coordinating Caribbean, African and Asian ones). The results were aggregated for the whole world. The main results are that the implementation of geoportals is a global activity, that the use of geoportals and spatial data will increase, that more services will be provided and new services will be introduced within the next 5 years. As the main drawbacks for implementation are considered: institutional problems, lack of specialized data managers and data standardization. Moreover, it seems that geoportals (of the developed world) have a positive impact on society. These impacts are mainly economic in nature.
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ItemFuture directions for SDI assessment( 2009)Over the last few years development of Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) have become an important subject and platform in Geo-Information Science to facilitate and coordinate the exchange and sharing of spatial data between stakeholders in the spatial data community. Its significance was demonstrated by numerous initiatives all over the world at different jurisdictional levels (global, regional, national and local levels). Large sums of money have been invested into SDI initiatives over the last few years. Worldwide around €120 million is spent each year just on clearinghouse management (Crompvoets, 2006). The investment requirements for an Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community (INSPIRE) at European, national, regional and local levels are estimated to be from €202 to €273 million each yea(INSPIRE, 2003). Given this expenditure and society’s interest in the proper and effective use of public funds, it is imperative that these SDI initiatives should be assessed. The assessment of SDIs can help to better understand the issues, to find best practice for certain tasks, and to improve the system as a whole and therefore it play a crucial role in the management of our spatial data and that pertaining to the administration of our societies. In addition, SDI assessment is increasingly attracting the attention of both public sector bureaucrats seeking justification for providing public sources to SDI, and SDI practitioners requiring a measure of success of their SDI strategy. For example, the implementation of the European directive establishing an Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community requires monitoring and regular reporting (European Commission, 2007). However, assessment and evaluation of SDI initiatives is difficult due to a number of reasons. Even within the SDI community there are differences in the understanding of SDI and its potential benefits. Craglia and Nowak (2006) raise this issue when reporting on the key findings of the International Workshop on SDI’s Cost-Benefit. Many researchers have tried to assess SDIs (Crompvoets, 2006; Delgado-Fernandez and Crompvoets, 2007; Delgado-Fernandez et al, 2005; Kok and van Loenen, 2005; Masser, 1999; Onsrud, 1998; Rodriguez-Pabon, 2005; Vandenbroucke, 2005; Steudler et al, 2004). All these attempts, however useful and valuable, either concentrate on one aspect of SDI, or are bounded by one region, or describe SDI development in few particular countries, or are still conceptual in nature. There is much confusion resulting from the lack of an agreed definition of SDI, its components and the relationships between them. Moreover, different studies on SDI assessment identify different benefits and assign them to different categories. Similar conclusions were also reported at the international workshop ‘Exploring Spatial Data Infrastructures’ (Grus et al, 2006). This makes it difficult to identify uniform criteria of merit for SDI inputs, utility, outputs and outcomes. SDI is also difficult to assess because of its complex, dynamic, multi-faceted and constantly evolving nature, and vaguely defined objectives. SDIs also differ between countries as the same implementing rules may cause different results. For example, at the European level, the INSPIRE directive lays down general rules for establishing an SDI for the European Community (European Commission, 2007). Nevertheless, despite the fact that SDIs in the member states will behave and operate in a similar general way as indicated by the directive, they will never be the same, and sometimes will differ considerably depending on political, economic and cultural national circumstances.
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ItemDeveloping a goal-oriented SDI assessment approach using GIDEON-the Dutch SDI implementation strategy-as a case study( 2009)In 2008, the Dutch government approved the GIDEON document as a policy aiming at the implementation of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) in the Netherlands. The execution of GIDEON should take place by pursuing seven implementation strategies which lead to the achievement of the GIDEON goals. GIDEON also expresses the need to monitor the progress of implementing its strategies and realization of its goals. Currently, the work has been started on monitoring the GIDEON implementation strategies. However, there is still a lack of knowledge and methods to monitor GIDEON goals realization. The challenge is to come up with an approach to assess to what extent these goals are achieved. As a response to the challenge of assessing the GIDEON goals, this paper explores the possibility of using the Multi-view SDI assessment framework (Grus et al., 2007). This paper presents and discusses the method that applies the Multi-view SDI assessment framework, its indicators and measurement methods to create a GIDEON assessment approach. The method of creating a GIDEON assessment approach consists of several procedural steps: formulating specific GIDEON objectives, organizing a one-day workshop involving focus group of specific stakeholders responsible for creation and execution of NSDI, asking the workshop participants to select from a long list those indicators that best measure the achievement of each GIDEON goals. The key step of GIDEON approach is a one-day workshop. The workshop participants represented all organizations that cooperated and/or created GIDEON. The workshop consisted of two parts: first part explained the context of a challenge of assessing GIDEON, second part included participants activity to select and come to the consensus on the list of indicators that would best measure GIDEON goals realization. Additionally, the participants were asked to evaluate and express feedback on the usefulness of the method of creating GIDEON assessment approach. The results show that several indicators that relate to specific SDI goals could be selected by a significant number of workshop participants. The indicators that have been selected are not the final ones yet, but provide a guideline and form a base of what has to be measured when assessing GIDEON goals. Involving the representatives of all parties committed to GIDEON into the process of GIDEON assessment approach creation will strengthen its robustness and acceptance. The results of the feedback form filled by each participant show that the presented method is useful or very useful to create GIDEON assessment approach. Additionally, some of the participants provided already their own indicators which are very specific for Dutch SDI monitoring. The method presented in this research, assuming that SDI goals are defined and the organizations that participate in SDI creation are known, can be applied in any other country to develop country-specific and practical SDI assessment approach.