SDI past, present and future: A review and status assessment

Abstract

A spatial data infrastructure (SDI) is an evolutionary concept related to the facilitation and coordination of the exchange and sharing of spatial data and services. Since its initial use, the SDI concept has shifted its focus from data sharing and coordination to supporting policy, from a top-down approach to a bottom-up approach, and from centralized to distributed and service-orientated approaches. Today, SDIs are responding to the mushrooming of cloud-based and location-based services, neogeography, crowd sourcing and volunteered geographic information (VGI). What will the role of SDIs be in future? A reference point is the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) Programme on Global Geospatial Information Management (GGIM) to address key global challenges. The success of such programmes relies on understanding the development of an SDI. This paper offers an initial examination of differences in SDI developments in three countries on three continents. We use the analogy of the human development stages to structure our description of the development of SDIs in Poland, South Africa and the United States of America (USA). First principles of SDIs are evident from this comparison. Our assessment is that SDIs remain important and significant for public administration and also for other actors, despite industry, technological advances, changing business models, VGI and neogeography activities. Web-based repositories provide geographic information for growing consumer-orientated applications, but the geographic information collected and maintained by public administrations will remain a driving force for developers requiring or wanting the reliability of authoritative geographic information.