Spatial Data Infrastructures: Concept, Sdi Hierarchy and Future Directions

The world as we know it is changing. Economies world wide are undergoing a process of profound and continuing structural change, and the global village is becoming a reality driven by IT and communication technologies. With this in mind, many countries believe that they can benefit both economically and environmentally from better management of their spatial data assets by taking a perspective that starts at a local level and proceeds through state, national and regional levels to global level. This has resulted in the development of the Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) concept at these levels. SDI is fundamentally about facilitation and coordination of the exchange and sharing of spatial data between stakeholders from different jurisdictional levels in the spatial data community. Understanding of its role and nature are important to the acceptance of the concept and its alignment with spatial industry objectives. The aim of this paper is to present the nature and concept of spatial data infrastructures, including the SDI hierarchy, which have helped to build understanding about the importance of the relationships within different levels of SDIs to support the interactions and partnerships of the spatial data communities. Moreover, the paper will highlight the importance of sharing and understanding its special social system, followed by a discussion of the future direction of SDIs. It is argued that by better understanding the future direction of SDIs, any SDI development can gain support from a wider community of both government and non-government data users and providers.