Towards a Linked Geospatial Data Infrastructure

The pressure of opening access to public sector geospatial information traditionally managed within disparate spatial data infrastructures (SDI) is driven by a combination of factors. These factors include the adoption of open data programs and the need to integrate spatial data across sectors and levels of government for specific applications. Informed by the success of the Linked Open Data community, efforts to leverage Linked Data in enabling global access to spatial data currently managed within national and regional SDIs are emerging. However, these early efforts do not provide guidelines for implementing such Linked SDI nor articulate the socio-technical requirements for a successful Linked Geospatial Data strategy. By analyzing existing SDI architectures and emerging Linked SDI requirements, we develop Reference Architecture for building interoperable Linked SDIs.