Like many countries, Australia is working through the significant institutional and technical issues involved in developing a National Spatial Data Infrastructure. The following paper looks at the issues of building an NSDI in general, and then examines an Australian initiative which has been functioning for some ten years, and has been extremely successful in building the foundation of the Australian Spatial Data Infrastructure.
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Data is a core building block of any spatial solution. In the 1970s and 1980s users were forced to go through the expensive process of creating their own data. However this constricted GIS use and the huge benefits it can bring, to a limited number of large organisations. Over the last decade there has been a large increase in demand for packaged, reasonably costed, quality spatial data.
The Internet and mobile revolutions have spawned new technologies such as Location Based Services (LBS) which has increased demand of an order of magnitude of millions of users. As a consequence the pressure for countries to quickly develop their respective NSDIs is increasing dramatically. However, there are a number of issues that decision-makers need to take into consideration when building their national foundation datasets and the associated processes to distribute the information. These include:
- The demand for geographic information is increasing so the NSDIs need to be built quickly - the time for academic discussion is over;
- Geographic information creation, maintenance and dissemination is very expensive;
- Government collects data as an administrative by-product of its other functions. For instance Census departments produce census maps as a by-product of conducting censuses. So the best base information is often owned by government;
- Government does not have speed or the resources to produce the wide variety of the value-add data products required by a fast evolving spatial information market; and
- Putting spatial data on a website or a meta-data search engine is not a panacea that magically provides spatial data access to the user community. The majority of users do not know they want "spatial data". They know they have a "business problem" and that they need a solution to that problem.
In summary, countries need to build their respective NSDIs quickly - governments cannot do it alone- and NSDIs will need to be marketed as solutions to business problems.
The Best Model for an NSDI ?
The creation of an NSDI that fulfils these requirements is not a technical problem. New technologies and the new OpenGIS Consortium (OGC) standards certainly help, but the task of creating a content rich and effectively used NSDI is a communication problem that requires a high degree of partnership between government and the private sector.
The following examines the relative strengths and weaknesses of the public and private sectors:
