SDI Convergence - Nederlandse Commissie voor Geodesie - KNAW

Spatial Data Infrastructure Convergence
Bastiaan van Loenen, Jaap Besemer and Jaap Zevenbergen
Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands
{b.vanloenen, j.w.j.besemer, j.a.zevenbergen}@tudelft.nl
Spatial data infrastructures (SDIs), and their underlying geographic information technologies,
play a critical role in allowing governments, local communities, non-government
organisations, the commercial sector, the academic community and common
people to make progress in addressing many of the worlds most pressing problems.
The approaches in building spatial data infrastructures within and among nations are in
many respects converging. Not only SDIs are converging, also many developments in
society stimulate convergence of SDIs.
Geographic information (GI) is special because it refers in one way or another to a location
relative to the earth. Other information can be linked to GI, for example, health
care information, telecommunications, financial information, and traffic information. This
specialty has not changed. However, the landscape of geo-information processing has.
Where previously only public parties collected, provided and used geo-information,
today this is done by almost everybody, varying from professional commercial data and
service providers to traditional providers in the public sector, and (volunteered) user
generated content providers. The last are often regular citizens that upload pictures on
Google Earth, update the route in their navigation software or the public transportation
route planner. This has resulted in geographic information rich societies in many places
around the globe where accessibility, coverage, accuracy, and timeliness has never
been as high.
The sector has seen a development from private editors of printed atlases meeting the
needs of the 1950s customer to the 2009 atlases and APIs which can be accessed
anywhere at any time. Similar to the world outside GI (see the replacement of Encyclopedia
Britannica by Wikipedia forcing Brittanica to move towards Britannica 2.0), the
major publishers of printed atlases are replaced by companies originating from outside
the traditional mapping sector (see Microsoft, Nokia, Google) satisfying the GI needs of
customers, but this time digital and online, and sometimes even real-time. Traditional
users of GI such as engineering companies are still there, but the end-user role is now
dominated by ICT-companies.
Not only GI-software and data providers are converging (e.g., TomTom and TeleAtlas)
also providers of services outside the geo-domain are now converging with geopartners
(e.g., Nokia and NavTeq). We have moved from traditional geographic data
acquisition by surveyors, aerial imagery and professional bureaus using GPS, to location
information collection through non-geo techniques such as mobile telephone networks,
wireless telecommunication networks, and radio frequency identification networks.
This resulted in convergence of geographic information with other domains, all
contributing to the geographic information component of the information infrastructure.
Also globalisation makes that SDIs do not stop at the national border. Increasingly national
SDIs adhere to or consider the international arena. New domains are now fuelled
with geographic information. Well-known examples are geographic information use in
organisations like the United Nations and the Worldbank, but also the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Greenpeace, WWF, International Federation of
Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, and parties operating in the national security
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