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Next  Santiago Borrero Secretary General, Pan American Institute of Geography and History (PAIGH), mexico sborrero@ipgh.org.mx Developing a nation’s information and communication infrastructure is significant, but equally important within a nation’s development strategy and its opportunities for progress, is the need to carefully pay attention to information content, including geographic data that better describes each nation’s territory and its resources In December 8, 2004, I addressed the audience participating at the conference on ‘The Role of Science in the Information Society’, organized in Geneva by CERN and UNESCO, as one of the main events happening in the context of the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). At the end of the event I got the impression that, for the second part of the Summit to take place in Tunisia in 2006, there is need to enlarge the number of activities related to geographic science and spatial data, otherwise, the role of geodata and, in particular, the relevant one corresponding to the development of sound Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) will not fit properly in the final declaration, with the subsequent consequences to the emerging nations and in general the developing world. In this context, I am presenting here some of the views I shared on that special week with colleagues from the ICT and development sectors, incoming from every region of the world. The reflections and recommendations on the role SDI can play in the context of today's information society and specially during the implementation phase that follows the UN Summit, are based upon the empirical knowledge gained from years of exposure in Colombia as the senior executive in charge of mapping, land information, geography and from working in the area of information and development with non-governmental organizations within the region and across the international community. Outside our specialized community, fortunately, today geographically-referenced information is recognized as an important kind of information. In fact, this type of information is available for the majority of developed regions in forms that over exceed the users capacity to apply it, given its relevancy, to many ‘endless’ applications. However, there is an enormous difference when looking at such cases like, for instance, the cities of Hamilton, Canada or Melbourne, Australia, just to mention a couple, in which the user can have relatively easy access to high-quality property ownership and topographic information that allows for review and to apply data about a specific neighborhood, square by square, parcel by parcel, even linking each lot to property rights. The opposite situation is found in many urban areas like Mogadishu (Somalia), Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam) or La Paz (Bolivia), where such digital location-based information is not existent or not available to the society, not to mention the many cases in which this situation is also the consequence of not having secure property titles or not having recognized property rights at all. Property ownership and rights has been a major factor responsible for the political instability of many developing countries. There is a completely more contrasting situation if we look for more detailed and complex data. This significant and growing differences in terms of the geo-referenced information available for development is, in my opinion, one of main components explaining the gap, so called ‘Digital Divide’. Some of the readers may not agree with these examples or, as I have heard from colleagues working on international development, that are of the opinion that having such databases and the corresponding information infrastructure, is a luxury that costs too much for the poorest societies, at a time in which they must attend to other priorities and fulfill basic needs.
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