Towards the construction of the Spanish National Geographic Information Infrastructure

The creation of specific organisations or programs for developing or overseeing the development of Spatial Data Infrastructures, particularly by government at various levels, can be seen as the logical extension of a long practice police oriented to co-ordinate the building of other necessary infrastructures for ongoing development such as transportation or telecommunication networks. This kind of infrastructure is already under construction in many nations within our technological sphere but yet noticeably absent in Spain. Recently, researchers from three universities in Spain have launched a project with the intention to encourage the development of a National Geographic Information Infrastructure in Spain. This work presents some functionality aspects of the system to be built for this project. This functionality is going to be supported by three main technological groups of components: Metadata catalogs, Web mapping servers, and Geographical data access and e-commerce.