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Extending the Quality Concept in Geo-Information Processing
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews the trends that are shaping the future of geographical information markets. Section 3 outlines the existing quality frameworks highlighting limitations. In Section 4, we introduce the concept of quality of services in the context of emerging geographical services infrastructures and Section 5 provides a summary.
2 Fundamental Trends in GI Environments
The explosive growth of the Internet continues to revolutionize the way modern day business is conducted and services provided. In recent years geographical information systems (GIS) and enter-prizes have continued to evolve towards distributed models in order to better exploit the potentials presented by the Internet computing paradigm. GIS systems have exhibited sustained evolution from stand alone, data-centric stovepipes to distributed models composed of open interoperable services while GI enterprizes continue to pursue exible models in order to leverage advances in business networking and e-commerce. Meanwhile the spatial data infrastructure (SDI) concept which emerged in the 1980s to advance spatial data sharing by taking advantage of the ubiquity of the Internet and its ease of use, has matured and is evolving into an infrastructure for the delivery of geoprocessing services, the so called geographical services infrastructure (GSI). In the follow-ing sections we brie y review each of these developments from a quality perspective. Section 2.1 reviews the trends in geographical information (GI) enterprizes. Sections 2.2 and 2.3 outline the concepts of the spatial data infrastructure (SDI) and the geographical service infrastructure (GSI) respectively.
2.1 Evolving GI Enterprizes
In a bid to improve performance, organizations charged with the responsibility of collecting, man-aging and disseminating geo-information have exhibited marked changes in their institutional and strategic set-ups in the past few decades [31, 23, 18]. Customer focus has been the overarching principle underlying pervasive re-engineering programs as providers strive to meet growing demand for a broad range of services and information products. Strategic partnerships and outsourcing arrangements are now commonplace with some providers (e.g. the Dutch Kadaster) expressly pro-viding for user councils in order to pro-actively align corporate strategy with user requirements. Development and deployment of elaborate quality management systems in accordance with ISO standards is another strategy that has been vigorously pursued and widely adopted in many en-terprizes to enhance the efficiency of business processes and achieve customer satisfaction [13].
Nonetheless, the fast pace and global nature of present day businesses coupled with the prevalence of e-commerce and the push for lean enterprizes continue to challenge providers of geographical information services and products. Furthermore, it is increasingly evident that it is beyond the ability of a single organization to meet all the service and information product needs of a rapidly growing user community. This demands a new framework to enable GI enterprizes to rapidly change their structures, enter and leave partnerships quickly, change roles, rapidly design and deliver new products and services in changing business environments.
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