Hierarchical Spatial Reasoning Applied to Spatial Data Infrastructures

Many countries throughout the world believe they can benefit both economically and environmentally from better management of their spatial data assets, enabling them to access and retrieve complete and consistent datasets in an easy and secure way. This has resulted in the development of the Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) concept at various political and/or administrative levels. The SDI concept has been represented by different descriptions of its nature, however, currently these demonstrate an overlysimplistic understanding of the concept. The simplicity in existing definitions has been slow to incorporate the concept of an integrated, multilevelled SDI formed from a hierarchy of inter-connected SDIs at corporate, local, state/provincial, national, regional (multi-national) and global (GSDI) levels. Failure to incorporate this multidimensionality, and the dynamic mechanistic and functional roles of the SDI, have rendered many descriptions of SDI inadequate to describe the complexity and the dynamics of SDI as it develops, and thus ultimately constrain SDI achieving developmental potential in the future. As a result, the objective of this paper is to demonstrate the fitness and applicability of Hierarchical Spatial Reasoning (HSR) as a theoretical framework to demonstrate the multi-dimensional nature of SDIs. It is argued that by better understanding and demonstrating the nature of an SDI hierarchy, any SDI development can gain support from a wider community of both government and non-government data users and providers. The findings presented in this paper build on the authors' experiences in Regional SDI (multi-national) development and HSR.