Designing an Integrated Enterprise Model to support Partnerships in the Geo-Information Industry

Continuous pressure on government budgets, rapid changes in business opportunities and quick technological improvements make today’s geo-information market very dynamic. This forces organisations, such as National Mapping Agencies (NMA) and GIS companies, to change the way they generate services and to adopt new working strategies. In this transition, organisations have realised that satisfying user with varieties of geo-information services, in large volumes and in near real-time mode, goes beyond the capacity of ’single’ organisations. Therefore, these organisations are seeking for mechanisms that enable them to work together in a more collaborative way. These collaborations can be better realised making use of modern business strategies such as the Virtual Enterprise. The Virtual Enterprise idea is very appealing to organisations working in a very dynamic and fastgrowing market. In a Virtual Enterprise (VE), individual (small as well as large) organisations or partthere-of work as a collaborative network to deliver specialised products or services on the basis of common business understanding. Such enterprises are called ”Virtual” because of their temporary nature, based on seizing business opportunities and exploiting the strengths offered by the information and Communication technology. A VE combines distributed functions provided by the participating organisations to deliver services, and it is structured and managed in such way that it is seen by third parties as one single enterprise. Within this context, the Geographic Data Infrastructure (GDI) is viewed as integrated entity linking data providers and user communities on the bases of the common goal of data sharing. Such an entity can be enhanced such that it is possible to share in addition to data, business goals, strategies, processes, operations, value-added products, etc. enabling the development of geo-virtual enterprises. In this environment any participant organization can extend its share to the ever-growing information market, by simply providing access to its geo-services and consequently becoming a tool that can be used in the generation of different ’complex’ services. In this setting, the GDI will become a collaborative working environment, linking autonomous nodes that cooperate in order to achieve business goals and to deliver services to their end users. The development of such an enterprise requires the design of an integration platform that enables interoperability and inter-working of functional entities within heterogeneous environment. The geo-information industry can benefit from the various models and tools that have been developed in other industries for integrated enterprise modeling, as well as the vast development made by OGC to develop standard, interoperable, access interfaces, to facilitate access to GIS services over the Internet (Web Services, Internet