Beyond SDI – Mike Goodchild (UCSB)

Thanks for asking! I gave a presentation in March 2018 at a Hong Kong conference on SDI that was part of their planning process for what they are calling CSDI, the C standing for community I believe. I’ve attached the ppt as the quickest way of summarizing what I said. I think the model of SDI that dates from 1993 needs to be rethought, in response to several significant changes: the changing economics of GI production, the rise of the private sector as a GI producer, the age of the neogeographer in which the citizen is both a producer and a consumer, etc. I think it is impossible today to separate data from software, since software is important at all stages of GI production, suggesting that the new vision needs to be one of geospatial infrastructure, rather than spatial data infrastructure. On that point I’ve also attached a paper I wrote with Jack Dangermond that appeared in the Wuhan journal recently.