SDI design to facilitate spatially enabled society

Abstract

The role that Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) initiatives are playing within society is changing. An SDI is a dynamic, hierarchic and multi-disciplinary concept that includes people, data, access networks, institutional policy, technical standards and human resource dimensions. SDIs were initially conceived as a mechanism to facilitate access and sharing of spatial data for use within a GIS environment. This was achieved through the use of a distributed network of data custodians and stakeholders in the spatial information community. Users however, now require the ability to gain access to precise spatial information in real time about real world objects, in order to support more effective cross-jurisdictional and inter-agency decision making in priority areas such as emergency management, disaster relief, natural resource management and water rights. The ability to gain access to information and services has moved well beyond the domain of single organisations, and SDIs now require an enabling platform to support the chaining of services across participating organisations.The ability to generate solutions to cross-jurisdictional issues has become a national priority for countries such as Australia as a federated state system and the development of effective decision-making tools is a major area of business for the spatial information industry. Much of the technology needed to create these solutions already exists; however, it also depends on an institutional and cultural willingness to share outside of ones immediate work group. This creates the need for jurisdictional governance and inter-agency collaborative arrangements to bring together both information and users to facilitate the realisation of spatially enabled society.

This chapter outlines the role of SDI in creating more effective decision-making processes to deal with cross-jurisdictional issues through the creation of an enabling platform that links services and information across jurisdictions and organisations. The creation of an enabling platform will be more than just the representation of feature based structures of the world but will also include the administration and institutional aspects of such features, enabling both technical and institutional considerations to be incorporated into decision-making. The chapter also discusses the central role that SDIs are playing in the development of such an enabling platform to facilitate the vision of spatially enabled society. This would support a knowledge base to access information derived from a model of integrated datasets from different perspectives.