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Spatial Data Infrastructures: A SWOTs analysis
 Ian Masser Professorial Fellow Department of Geomatics, Faculty of Engineering University of Melbourne Email: masser@onetel.com Introduction Recently I was asked by some students after a lecture on Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) to summarise what I saw as the strengths and weaknesses of current SDIs and what I regarded as the main opportunities to be exploited and the threats to be faced in the immediate future. In other words I was being asked to make a SWOTs analysis of the whole SDI field. I found this to be a very challenging and exciting task. This prompted me later to expand and develop my initial responses to their questions in the following article. Strengths The most important strength of the SDI concept is the way in which it enables a diverse group of users to access a wide range of spatially referenced data sets. The underlying rationale for SDIs is to maximise the use that is made of local, national and global geographic information assets and their ultimate success or failure is likely to be measured largely in these terms. In this way SDIs also make an important contribution to economic growth and job creation at the locals, national and global levels as well as promoting more effective and transparent decision making in both the public and private sectors. The second main strength is the degree to which the SDI concept straddles existing professional and administrative sectoral boundaries. It is inherently an integrating concept that facilitates the use of local, national and global geographic information assets many times in many different applications. Recognition of the importance of integrating data from many diverse sources is already encouraging the merger of previously separate professional bodies in some countries. In Australia, for example, a Spatial Sciences Institute was set up in 2003 to bring together the disciplines of surveying, mapping, engineering and mining, surveying, remote sensing and photogrammetry (www.spatialsciences.org.au). At the global level a Global Spatial Data Infrastructure Association was set up in 2004 ‘to promote international cooperation and collaboration in support of local, national and international spatial data infrastructure developments that will allow nations to better address social, economic and environmental issues of pressing importance’ (www.gsdi.org). Its membership includes organisations of all kinds in both the public and private sectors as well as not for profit organisations and academia from all parts of the world. The third main strength of the SDI concept is the way it has exploited recent developments in location based services and the Internet and the World Wide Web. The importance of the latter was recognised by the US Mapping Sciences Committee in their report on Distributed Geolibraries (National Research Council 1999, 31). In their view, 'the WWW has added a new and radically different dimension to its earlier conception of the NSDI, one that is much more user oriented, much more effective in maximising the added value of the nation's geoinformation assets, and much more cost effective as a data dissemination mechanism’. |