Lessons Learned from local, National and Global Spatial data Infrastructures
What do we mean by a Spatial Data Infrastructure?
Formal definitions of SDIs vary significantly around the world. A definition of the US National Spatial Data Infrastructure is shown below, together with that of the putative Global Spatial Data Infrastructure (GSDI):
[NSDI is] ‘the technology, policies, standards, and human resources necessary to acquire, process, store, distribute, and improve utilization of geospatial data’. Source: Presidential Executive Order #12906: ‘Co-ordinating Geographic Data Acquisition and Access: The National Spatial Data Infrastructure’, 1994
‘The GSDI is the broad policy, organizational, technical and financial arrangements necessary to support global access to geographic information’. Source: Steering Committee of the Global Spatial Data Infrastructure (see http://www.gsdi.org)
The differences in these are subtle but important. For instance, the financial underpinnings of NSDIs were largely ignored in the early years, as were the commercial and private sector contributions. Many originally saw the entire NSDI enterprise being driven by new technologies, especially Geographical Information Systems. The progressive acceptance of Geographical Information Science has broadened the concept of NSDIs to include a stronger research and education agenda. In the USA in particular, the NSDI was originally driven by federal government agencies and the Federal Geographic Data Committee in particular; this has led to much debate on how to create leadership in an enterprise that necessarily spans many organisations of different sizes, value systems and other characteristics in the government, private, not-for-profit and academic sectors. No universal answer has yet emerged – or is likely to do so.
In the UK, a fundamentally different – and somewhat smaller scale and pragmatic – approach was followed. Beginning formally in 1995, the National Geospatial Data Framework (NGDF) was established with the primary objective of ‘unlocking geographic information’. Relatively little attempt was made to describe what is the NGDF; rather a strategy was defined and a series of tasks identified whose successful completion would achieve that objective. Details of the NGDF approach are given by Hadley’s paper to this conference.
Brief summaries and evaluations of the US NSDI and the UK NGDF
The US scene – an outsider’s view
The Presidential Executive Order (see above) identified three primary areas to promote development of the NSDI. The first was the development of standards, the second improvement of access to and sharing of data by developing a National Geospatial Data Clearinghouse, and the third was the development of the National Digital Geospatial Data Framework. All of these efforts were to be carried out through partnerships among federal, state and local agencies, the private and academic sectors, and non-profit organizations. Presidential Executive Orders in the USA are only enforceable in regard to federal agencies: such cross-sectoral adherence could only be achieved by influence and leverage obtained through federal funding.
The Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) operates as a bureaucracy through a series of subcommittees based on different themes of geospatial data (e.g. soils, transportation, cadastral), each chaired by a different federal agency. Many of these groups have developed standards for data collection and content, classifications, data presentation and data management to facilitate data sharing. For example, the Standards Working Group developed the metadata standard, which was formally adopted by the FGDC in mid-1994 and has since been adapted in the light of international and other national developments. All of the FGDC-developed standards undergo an extensive public review process. This includes nationally advertised comment and testing phases plus solicitation of comments from state and local government agencies, private sector firms, and professional societies. The NSDI Executive Order mandated that all federal agencies to use all FGDC-adopted standards.
The second activity area is intended to facilitate access to data, minimize duplication and assist partnerships for data production where common needs exist. This has been done by helping to advertise the availability of Geographical Information through development of a National Geospatial Data Clearinghouse. Agencies producing data describe its existence with metadata and serve those metadata on the Internet in such a way that they can be accessed by commonly used Internet search and query tools. This has been rendered practicable by the development of metadata-creating software within GIS by the larger vendors. As a result of all this, nearly all federal agencies, as well as most States and numerous local jurisdictions, have become active users of the Internet for disseminating geospatial data. This model does not necessarily assume that GI will be distributed for free. Obtaining some of the data sets requires the payment of a fee, others are free. The Clearinghouse can also be used to help find partners for database development by advertising interest in or needs for GI.