The Essentiality of Geospatial Information Standardisation for Sustainable Development

ABSTRACT
There's no doubt that data are vital to GIS operations, and the cost of managing multiple and various formats can be significant. Typically, geographic data is used by many people other than the producers. Data costs affect decisions at all levels to create frameworks to establish good communication channels for both users and producers of spatial data. Standards provide this common language, thus enabling parties to exchange data without misunderstandings (Fadaie et al. 2004). Although everybody recognise that standards have become essential in every corner of our life but they are usually considered as dull topics that seems to block inspiration and flexibility. A major challenge for the international community during the next decade is to make geographic information more accessible and useful to decision makers working on sustainable development problems. However, increasingly the major GIS vendors are seeing that their future lies in developing their products into ‘open systems’ environments (Armitage, 2006). This paper traces the emergence of standardisation, outlining the significance of National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) development to enterprise GIS. A key word in this approach is ‘interoperability’ which is applied at both the data and process levels.

Geoportal
Immediate access and use of geospatial information and applications are essential for effective management of all types of critical infrastructure systems such as: Geo-resource Management, Energy, Water Supply, Telecommunications, Transportation, Banking and Finance, Emergency Services, Health Services, and Government Services. The ability to rapidly share and apply geospatial information is important because emergency and disaster management in these domains requires cooperation among a broad range of organisations operating across many jurisdictions. Without a supporting, standards-based mechanism to search for, find, access and use this information, valuable sources may go unnoticed, data may be duplicated, and opportunities for collaboration may be lost.

The general purpose of metadata is to enable the user to identify, evaluate, select, obtain, and possibly use the needed datasets.

Data mining
Data mining or knowledge discovery in databases (KDD) is the nontrivial extraction of implicit, previously unknown, and potentially useful information from data. This encompasses a number of different technical approaches, such as clustering, data summarisation, classification rules and dependency networks. The patterns and regularities that are found by data analysing, represent valuable knowledge about the data sets and the objects in them.

Clearinghouses and Metadata
Metadata is commonly defined as "data about data" (ANZLIC 1996; Kildow 1996; ANZLIC 1997). Metadata allows a producer to describe a dataset fully so that users can understand the assumptions and limitations and evaluate the dataset's applicability for their intended use.