Building seamless SDI to facilitate land and marine environments

Abstract

Due to the high economic value of coastal and marine activities, and to the social value of coastal zones for quality of life, managing the coastal zone is a key component of the socio-economic framework in most nations with coastlines. In recent times several natural disasters hit some part of the coastal areas around the world in particular small islands and archipelagic countries causing hundreds thousands of peoples lost their lives, while those who survived had lost their properties. Learning from such kind of devastating disasters, it is important to have a functioning spatial data infrastructure (SDI) which facilitates discovery, access and sharing accurate, complete and up-to-dated spatial data for better planning and timely disaster management. Sustainable development requires the availability of integrated and comprehensive spatial information throughout the country both land and marine area, that can easily be found and accessed for public.

Having said that, however current SDI design is focused mainly on access to and use of land related datasets or marine related datasets, with most SDI initiatives stopping at the land-ward or marine-ward boundary of the coastline, institutionally and/or spatially. Consequently, there is a lack of harmonised and universal access to seamless datasets from marine, coastal and land-based spatial data providers. This leads to the creation of inconsistencies in spatial information policies, data creation, data access, and data integration across the coastal zone. The extension of an SDI covering the land and marine environments on a seamless platform would facilitate greater access to more interoperable spatial data and information across the land-marine interface enabling amore integrated and holistic approach to management of the coastal zone.

This paper aims to identify and discuss the main characteristics and criteria for utilisation of a Seamless SDI model and to examine the current barriers against implementation of this model. This would help to develop an extended framework to support a spatially enabled jurisdiction covering the land-sea interface. A Seamless SDI leads to the promotion of data sharing and communication between organisations thus facilitating better decision-making involving marine and coastal spatial information.