SDI Convergence - Global Spatial Data Infrastructure Association

Table 1: Differences between GeoWeb 1.0 and 2.0 (Maguire, 2005).
GeoWeb 1.0 GeoWeb 2.0
Static
Publishing
Producer centric
Centralised
Close coupling
Basic
Dynamic
Participation
User centric
Decentralised
Loose coupling (e.g. mash ups)
Rich
The launch of Google Earth in June 2005 brought many of the elements of the GeoWeb
2.0 within reach of millions of users. Google Earth combined the powerful search
engines developed by Google with the ability to zoom rapidly in or out from space to
the neighbourhood street level. It also created new opportunities for these users to
overlay their own spatial data on the top of Google Earth’s background imagery. As
Butler (2006, 776) pointed out in an article in the science journal, Nature: ‘By offering
researchers an easy way into GIS software, Google Earth and other virtual globes are
set to go beyond representing the world, and start changing it.’ For this reason they
must be regarded as ‘disruptive technologies’ that are transforming the GIS industry in
ways that the market does not expect.
A position paper from the Vespucci initiative (Craglia et al., 2008) highlights some of
the impacts of the developments in information technology, spatial data infrastructures
and earth observation that have taken place since the launch of Vice President Gore’s
(1998) vision of Digital Earth. It points out that many elements of his vision are now
regularly being used by large numbers of people throughout the world and that geography
has become an important way of organising many different kinds of digital spatial
data that are now regularly collected by sensors that provide multi level spectral information
about the earth’s surface in large scale intergovernmental initiatives such as the
Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS). The paper also sets out its
own vision for the next five to ten years. Elements of this vision include the development
of multiple connected infrastructures addressing the needs of different audiences,
and the possibility of searches through time and space to find analogous situations with
real time data from both sensors and individuals.
3. FROM PRODUCERS TO USERS - THE GENERATION ANALOGY
There are interesting parallels between the shift from producers to users that has occurred
as a result of emergence of the WWW and the changes that have taken place in
the governance of SDIs over this time. A good example of the latter can be found in the
typology of SDIs that has been developed in the course of the State of Play studies that
have been carried out by the Spatial Application Division at the University of Leuven for
the European Commission over the last five years (Vandenbroucke et al., 2008). This
typology is based on the coordination aspects of national SDI initiatives. Matters of coordination
have been emphasised because 'it is obvious coordination is the major success
factor for each SDI since coordination is tackled in different ways according to the
political and administrative organisation of the country' (SADL, 2003). A basic distinction
is made between countries where a national data producer such as a mapping
agency has an implicit mandate to set up a SDI and countries where SDI development
is being driven by a council of Ministries, a GI association or a partnership of data users.
A further distinction is then made between initiatives that do and do not involve users
in the case of the former and between those that have a formal mandate and those
that do not in the case of the latter.
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