Page 1 of 3 Next  A. R. Dasgupta Hon. Adviser, GIS Development and Distinguished Professor, BISAG arup.dasgupta@gisdevelopment.net One of the stated objectives of any spatial data infrastructure is to make available data and applications to the 'widest possible group of potential users'. The widest possible group' has been left vague and its interpretation is therefore open. The Permanent Committee on GIS Infrastructure for Asia and the Pacific, PCGIAP, views the SDI as an infrastructure with the same rationale as roads and telecommunications networks. It states that the governments have a role "on behalf of the community, to provide a common and consistent infrastructure upon which a variety of government, private sector and community activities can take place". "SDI is needed to support the regions economic growth and its social and environmental objectives, backed by international standards, guidelines and policies on the access of those data." The stress on common and consistent infrastructure merits further inspection, as this is the rationale behind interoperability. However, what is 'common and consistent' will depend on who is the beneficiary. We shall try to examine this aspect of interoperability in this paper. In most approaches to information systems, the end user is taken for granted. We would like to reverse the process and begin our quest by identifying the end users and their needs. At the organisational level, this would include both governmental and private agencies. In the area of development, Non-governmental agencies play an important role. Development of new and advanced technologies requires the involvement of institutions for education, training and research. Finally, we must address the community of citizens for whom information is a necessity for survival and development. We can organise these players into three groups. The first are those who generate the data like Survey of India or the National Remote Sensing Agency. The second are those who add value to the data by extracting information from a suite of data. In this category, we have a very wide range of players ranging from government departments to commercial enterprises. The third category is the information users who reap the benefit of the availability of information by way of economic growth. In this category, we can put administrators, managers, NGOs, farmers' co-operatives, individuals and the public. At the level of the data generating organisations the importance of interoperability is well understood. For example, NASA has established a Geospatial Interoperability Office to see that its science information is fully utilised. The GIO sponsors the development of geospatial interoperability standards, system architectures and data management strategies to increase the access to and utilisation of NASA's scientific information.1 The Earth-Sun System Gateway2 is one such effort to create an open standards-based portal to geographic data and services. This system can be accessed online at http://esg.gsfc.nasa.gov and is based on specifications drawn up by the FGDC, OGC and ISO. It utilises open standard web protocols to provide access to geospatial data, imagery, models and visualisations.
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