Expanding the ICA model of stakeholders in a spatial data infrastructure (SDI)

Abstract

No mapping agency can expect to capture and process entirely by itself, all the geospatial data needed for its products. The agency needs data sets from elsewhere and workflows and protocols for creating its various products. Unsurprisingly, such workflows and inter-institutional arrangements have evolved into broader collaborations, particularly as spatial data infrastructures (SDIs). An SDI is an evolving concept about facilitating and coordinating the exchange and sharing of geospatial data and services between stakeholders from different levels in the geospatial data community. The Commission on SDI & Standards (and its predecessors) of the International Cartographic Association (ICA) has developed formal models of an SDI, using the viewpoints of the Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP) and the Unified Modeling Language (UML) for the detailed modelling. The Commission described an SDI from the Enterprise Viewpoint (purpose, scope and policies for an SDI), Information Viewpoint (semantics of information and information processing in an SDI) and Computational Viewpoint (functional decomposition of the SDI into a set of services that interact through interfaces) (Hjelmager et al., 2008, Cooper et al., 2012). The ICA Commission did not investigate the Engineering and Technology Viewpoints of an SDI, because they are implementation-specific and the Commission has aimed at providing technology-independent models for an SDI. Other researchers have used the Engineering and Technology Viewpoints for specific SDIs.