Author: Secretariat EUROGI

EUROGI has invited a number of geospatial thought leaders to provide a statement on ‘Beyond SDI’, with the below quoted paragraphs as stimuli.  The position statements received are herewith published by EUROGI as starters for online discussion threads and will lead to a perspectives document to be discussed at the EUROGI session at the Geospatial World Forum conference in Amsterdam on 8 April 2020 – https://geospatialworldforum.org/. The past decades have witnessed the conceptualization and implementation of Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) […]

The paradox of a good infrastructure is that once it works, it becomes invisible to the user. Do you ever think about the infrastructure behind the water running out of a tap in your house or the distribution network that makes it possible to plug the charger of your mobile phone into a wall socket? Probably not, because in most developed countries, those infrastructures are well maintained and provide the facilities and services required for the functioning of society. Are […]

Before we talk about “Beyond SDI’s”, let’s recognize what the SDI’s (SDI-Proper, where the objective is to support a wide variety of spatial data themes) have brought us the past 20 years! Albeit the OGC never published a document with SDI (GSDI association provided the key concepts) in the title, OGC’s OWS is in the core of the SDI. https://geoseer.net reports over 1.7 million distinct spatial GIS datasets hosted on over 210.000 live services. The world relies on these operational […]

Towards an Integrated Geospatial Information Paradigm The first iterations of Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) development emerged in the mid-1980s, designed to promote economic development through supporting the objectives of governments and supporting environmental sustainability. However, SDI’s took a substantial step forward in the early 1990s when the United States Office of Management and Budget (OMB) established an interagency Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) to coordinate the ‘development, use, sharing, and dissemination of surveying, mapping, and related spatial data’. OMB Circular […]

Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) have gradually changed from a pool of authoritative data shared using standardized web services to a pool where the authoritative data co-exist with data collected by volunteers and different sensors. Many efforts were dedicated to data documentation, to improving the catalogues searching techniques by means of, for example, thesauri and to sharing these data using standardized web services such as Web Map Service, Web Feature Service or Web Coverage Service. Cloud computing technologies played an important […]

SDIs deliver authoritative foundation spatial data, but in the same way that transport infrastructure supports transport networks (delivering value to transport users, the economy, and society),  the next step is to use SDIs to create effective data networks to support better analyses, monitoring, evaluation, and decision-making. Standardisation of technical interfaces was an enabling driver, but the real value of today’s SDIs is vested in improved governance, and standardisation of identifiers and data models.  Tomorrow’s SDIs should provide relationships between objects […]

When I started working seriously in the field of SDI, around 2001, and then got involved in the drafting of the INSPIRE Implementation Rules for Metadata, I stated publicly that the end result of INSPIRE was not going to be an operational, single SDI: an information system.  We were not building a bridge or the electricity grid (even though we used that metaphor to describe our new infrastructure). Just like the digital libraries we were copying, where there was not […]

SDIs, undoubtedly, hold immense potential to support analytics of complex socio-environmental processes and assist in addressing some of the most important questions of our times. In particular, the paradigm of environmental intelligence is becoming the next big thing in future applications. It builds on: advanced Earth Observation infrastructures for nearly real-time monitoring (e.g. Copernicus), increasingly sophisticated data integration mechanisms and standards (e.g. OGC, INSPIRE), and advanced analytics capacities based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and High-Performance Computing (HPC), Environmental intelligence could […]