Burning Issue

This month's hot topic:

What message are we sending to senior level decision makers about the importance and value of Spatial Data Infrastructure - SDI - if we keep misrepresenting what SDI is or is all about?

In previous editorials in this magazine I have touched on various SDI issues, especially now that the pan-European SDI has achieved a legally mandated status within the European Union's 27 Member States. Yet I fear that the Geographic Information community - or communities, for there are many - continue to mistake components of an SDI for the SDI itself.

Having recently attended the informative GSDI Association's 10th global SDI conference in Trinidad, I was struck by the number of presentations that continue to show the 'SDI' as a 'thing' stuck inside a single block or bubble in various diagrams supposedly illustrating the importance of SDIs or how SDIs are implemented or similar. Yet many information infrastructure experts realize that an SDI is NOT something that you can stick in a box on a block diagram.

Look at any of the scores of definitions for "SDI" that appear in academic papers, in national and regional SDI strategy and vision papers, in SDI implementation guides (the few that actually exist) - and you will recognize that SDIs are composed of too many disparate elements - technical, legal, political, societal - to ever be conveniently herded into a single block on a diagram. To my mind, those implementing organizations who stand the best chance of implementing an SDI are those who have recognized that SDI is a process, not a thing, comprising many different and disparate elements, which will be implemented in different ways, at different speeds, different costs (and benefits) and with different impacts.

Finally, any one with even passing familiarity with the hundreds of e-government initiatives arising from the heady mid-90s period of "Information Society" awakening, will be aware that many - even most? - SDI initiatives and strategies are being developed in parallel with e-government activities, but seldom in touch with them or, in some cases, even in harmony. Yet information infrastructure is information infrastructure, whether it relates to government data, to spatially attributed government data or to just about any other type of information.

Ask yourself just one question. Of what value would your mobile phone be - itself the key component of the mobile telephone infrastructure - if it was not transparently and universally connectable to the global land-line telephone communications system? The latter uses quite different technology, has different ownership characteristics, different uptake and usage statistics, and a longer established and more complex history, technically and politically. The technology used by both sides of this telecommunications infrastructure changes continually, business models change (public ownership to private ownership to public-private partnerships, etc.), legal requirements change (universal access? free 911 calls?), standards change - essentially the whole infrastructure is an evolutionary process - not a 'thing'.

Maybe it is time that the SDI proponents of the world allocated some real resources - people, time and budgets - to tracking e-government activities in their nations and regions - and began knocking on doors of those agencies responsible for implementing these important elements of the Information Society.

Responses to roger@geoconnexion.com

Roger Longhorn