Burning Issue

This month's hot topic:

How valuable are our efforts on SDIs if we don’t actively address the human issues? Think about all the government regulations, technical implementation plans, internal processes and procedures, data sharing networks and so on. These are arguably meaningless if there is no buy-in or understanding from the people who must deliver against them.

During the 1Spatial Conference 2008 where there was a large number of presentations on a wide range of important industry topics ranging from data quality, data integration and data maintenance to open source and INSPIRE. But there were very few presentations that focused on the human aspects of our business. There was one such presentation made by Tyler Mitchell, Executive Director from the OSGeo. This made me consider how much as an industry do we communicate about the importance of people in all our industry musings? Now that the INSPIRE transposition phase is upon us and organisations are working away at legal compliance and impact assessments, are they taking the human aspect into account? In the previous column Roger (Longhorn) referred to the many components of the SDI, human factors must surely be a significant component.

In any SDI access to data may be blocked or latest versions of data may not be easily procured and the reasons are many. However, let’s just focus on one fairly obvious one that has been with the industry for a very long time: the perceived quality of those data from the originating party and by the requesting party. If I was a data custodian or manager responsible for providing access to and sharing our geospatial information I would want to ensure that those data were fit for purpose (high quality) and well documented (metadata) internally. I am not sure that I would be bothered about other entities use of the data, unless…there was added value in it for me. How do we find mechanisms for dealing with this issue, keeping both parties happy and limiting the cost of sending data and requests for data back and forth?

Lets take an example. A utility or municipal administration will have location information about properties in advance of the inclusion of such data in the detailed topographic database. Let’s assume that these organisations are committed to data sharing. They send their updates to the National Mapping Agency (redline or as built). If at the next update cycle these changes are not incorporated then the data officer has a mismatch problem to handle. Not only has no benefit accrued to the data officers, but they are also about to incur an additional cost to handle the temporal mismatch. SDIs in order to work to the benefit of the data administrators need to incorporate geospatial data supply chain principles supported by robust workflow processes.

The extensive report relating to data integration challenges commissioned by GeoConnections [a Canadian organization coordinating the implementation of the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure (CGDI)] has some great material around this topic and some of the fundamental issues associated with data sharing. It suggests to me that the human aspect is critical in SDIs.
I remember hearing another quote at our conference and apologies for not attributing it to anyone, “Data is central without it there is no GIS.” Data are very important and underpin our industry and many decisions, but maybe people are even more important, since without them there is neither data nor GIS!

Responses to roger@geoconnexion.com, steven.ramage@1spatial.com

Steven Ramage
Contributor