Towards a policy framework for integrating space technology applications for sustainable development on the information superhighway

5. Building spatial data infrastructures:
national and global imperatives and initiatives

There is increasing realization that in the twenty-first century, information will be the critical force shaping the world’s economic systems, and information creation, accessibility and the speed with which it is disseminated to the end-users in the format and style they are looking for will ultimately dictate the fundamental changes in a country’s overall position in the global market. In the coming years, multiple networks composed of different transmission media such as fibre optic cable, coaxial cable, satellites and radio will carry a broad range of ICT applications into homes, offices, schools and hospitals, in turn creating a seamless web spun around the world, providing opportunities and challenges for individuals, industry and Governments (Brown and others, 2001). The ICT convergence has blurred the distinct boundaries that existed between the types of networks used earlier to provide voice, data and video services. Thus was born the idea of a global information infrastructure (GII). A nascent GII already exists with the advent of the Internet, but what is now envisaged is a superior GII that has much higher capacity and is fully interactive, faster and more versatile, while at the same time less expensive. At the national level, many Governments have realized that communications, information services, and information technology sectors are not only dynamic growth sectors but are also engines of growth throughout the economy, and therefore they have initiated activities to position their own national information infrastructure (NII). NII is expected to provide for the integration of hardware, software and skills that will make it easy and affordable to connect people with one another, with computers, and with a vast array of services and information sources. It is expected to be a seamless web of communication networks, including computers, televisions, telephones and satellites. Towards defining the scope of NII, the National Information Infrastructure Advisory Council of the United States delineated a framework of fundamental principles, viz., (a) universal access and services, (b) privacy and security, (c) intellectual property, (d) education for life-long learning and (e) electronic commerce. Essentially, an NII involves an enabling role for the Government, with private industry playing a major role in creating and managing the networks. NIIs will essentially be a part of the ultimate GII.

In a nutshell, GII is a “network of networks” interconnecting local, national, regional and global networks, and goes beyond just hardware and software: it is also a system of applications, activities and relationships. Such a mammoth exercise of interconnections calls for standards, interfaces and protocols that facilitate the interoperability of a whole host of instruments and devices connected to networks, that ensure privacy of information carried across, and that above all assure the security and reliability of the very networks themselves. To build the GII, with its complex technical network connectivity and the differing political interests of the countries, it is considered necessary to have some basic principles (Brown and others, 2001) to serve as the foundation, such as (a) encouraging private investment, (b) promoting healthy competition, (c) providing open access to networks and services, (d) creating a flexible regulatory environment to keep pace with fast-changing technological and market developments and (e) ensuring universal service. Obviously, each one of the principles has associated difficulties in actual implementation at the international level, and ultimately the success of the whole enterprise depends on how in actual practice the principles are translated into concrete action for implementation by the national Governments at different levels. There are many key issues, even for one country trying to implement its own NII, before it is linked to others on a GII. The role of regional and international bodies in the whole exercise is to increase the pace of development of a consensus-based, voluntary and transparent system taking care of all concerned while meeting the end objectives.

Even as efforts to generate information infrastructures continue at both national and global levels, it has dawned on some policy makers that, without spatial content, the information itself may not be of any major use for developmental applications. Thus was born the idea of spatial information infrastructures. Satellite images, from coarse 1-km resolution to fine 1-m resolution, are available for many resource and environmental applications, not to speak of the strategic and tactical applications. The Global Positioning System provides the capability for obtaining precise geodetic positions for all kinds of natural and man-made features. The ever-increasing advances in the Internet and World Wide Web enable rapid exchange of data and information and provide a technology base for clearing-house networks and web-mapping services.

5.1 Spatial data infrastructure

Agenda 21, adopted at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in 1992, stressed the importance of geographic information in support of decision-making and management of many issues affecting the quality of life. Geographic information is vital for making sound decisions at the local, regional and global levels. Natural resources and environment management, facility management and disaster management all need geographic information together with associated attribute data so that decision-making will be more focused and effective in terms of cost, time and value. Information without the spatial content is not of much use to decision makers. The advances in satellite remote sensing, mapping and geospatial science and technology, increasing data acquisition capability, availability of cost - effective powerful computing capability, combined with the developments in GIS have tremendously increased the demand for spatial information services. It is now possible to obtain, integrate and analyse large amounts of information to visualize alternative scenarios, thus facilitating greater knowledge of future outcomes. The concept of a spatial data infrastructure (SDI) evolved from this possibility. “SDI” is often used to denote the relevant base collection of technologies, policies and institutional arrangements that facilitate the availability of and access to spatial data.

An SDI provides a basis for spatial data discovery, evaluation and application for users and providers within all levels of government, non-government, academic and commercial sectors. Many national, regional and international programmes and projects are working to improve the access to available spatial data, promote its use, and ensure additional investment in spatial information collection and management. It is true of many initiatives, even if they are not actually labelled “SDI initiatives”. In regions characterized by the availability of geographic information in combination with the power of GIS, decision-support tools, databases and the World Wide Web and their associated interoperability, the way better-resourced communities address critical issues of social, environment and economic importance is changing rapidly (Nebert, 2001). There is a clear need, at all levels, to be able to access, integrate and use spatial data from different sources in guiding decision-making. It is only through common conventions, protocols and agreements that a viable, economically sensible SDI can be arrived at, avoiding unnecessary duplication of work, and parallel and costly development of the tools needed for discovering, exchanging and exploiting spatial data. The word “infrastructure” is used to promote the concept of a reliable supporting environment that facilitates the access to geographically related information using a set of standard practices, protocols and specifications. An SDI captures this concept of facilitating the conveyance of virtually unlimited packages of geographic information.

An SDI brings in a host of geographic databases and attributes, metadata (i.e. information about information), means to discover, visualize and evaluate the data (catalogues and web mapping), and some method to provide access to geographic data. Besides the above, there are additional services and software to support applications. The capabilities of modern GIS and the networking and transmission technologies, including communication and imaging technologies, have made it possible to assemble and process sophisticated spatial data sets for sound decision-making. From a policy perspective, there are several key issues that drive the development of SDIs. The key policy drivers appear to be technology modernization, the need to effectively coordinate currently disparate government functions or levels of government, the desire for better governance, and the desire to implement principles of sustainable development (Moeller and Reichardt, 2001). Obviously, the role of space technology in an SDI, particularly through satellite communication, in satellite remote sensing, and in GIS and GPS is enormous, in both the “conduit” and “contents” domains. Many countries in the region, such as Australia, India, Japan and Malaysia, have initiated action to position a national-level spatial data infrastructure for informed decision-making. In the coming years, it is expected that more and more countries in this region will join these ongoing global efforts in a big way and position appropriate policies and regulatory frameworks for deriving the full benefits of this opportunity.

In developing an SDI, the national Governments recognize the need for wider participation of the private sector, as ultimately the beneficiaries are from the public and private sectors, academia and non-government organizations, as well as individuals. In building the SDI, besides the various national initiatives, there are also transnational SDI initiatives such as the Permanent Committee for Geospatial Infrastructure for Asia and the Pacific, formed through the United Nations Regional Cartographic Conference for Asia and the Pacific, in which 55 countries have agreed to cooperate on the establishment of a common regional forum, the sharing of best practices and other matters to further promote collaboration on issues of mutual concern <www.permcom.apgis.gov.au>.

5.2 The Global Spatial Data Infrastructure

As national SDI activities and the regional initiatives such as the above Permanent Committee grow, enough interest has been generated globally to formalize fairly large and active groups promoting the concept of the Global Spatial Data Infrastructure. GSDI is intended to be non-competitive, and to build on and unify common activities in the field of geographic information exchanges and harmonization. It is envisaged that it will support transnational or global access in order to promote geographic information, and it is seen by many as central to the response to the challenge of global sustainable development.

GSDI actively promotes the building of NSDIs through training and limited financial support, encouraging interoperability, and facilitating the development of international standards and the authoring and distribution of guidelines and examples for implementing NSDIs throughout the world (Stevans, 2001).

GSDI and NSDIs emphasize (a) the development of consistent reusable themes of base cartographic content, (b) describing the metadata, (c) geospatial data cataloguing to search across multiple servers, (d) geospatial data visualization through online mapping and (e) geospatial data access and delivery. The GSDI Secretariat has brought out The SDI Cookbook, addressing all the above relevant issues. Obviously, standards and interoperability are major technical issues to be resolved before the larger policy issues across countries are taken up.

Each one of the mentioned activities has specific policy and regulatory considerations, in which consensus has to be developed before an operational GSDI takes shape. For example, in the data access and delivery segment, the standards related to geospatial data access are still in their infancy. Some standards of relevance include those from ISO TC 211, Open GIS Consortium (OGC) <www.opengis.org>, and Internet-related bodies such as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) <www.w3.org> and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). W3C has the vision of developing an open, cross-platform and extensible computing environment on the web, towards achieving a productive standardization, for both the vendors and users. The current efforts aim to migrate from the existing Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) to Extensible Markup Language (XML), through which the “marked-up” files will be able to describe the data they contain to the browsers. The Open GIS Consortium is driving the adoption of Geography Markup Language/Extensible Markup Language (GML/XML) <www.opengis.org/techno/specs/00-029/GMl.html> to enable seamless access and integration of geospatial data available on the Internet. Once in place, these developments will have vast implications for the GIS market, as it will not really matter to the users how a GIS is organized internally and there will not be any need to standardize data structures. It will then only be necessary to develop a transformation from internal formats to the web-computing platform. Such advancements and acceptance of common standards offer unprecedented GIS connectivity, using the Internet to bring together data providers and data users anywhere on the network, anywhere in the world.

One common problem with online access to data through a single infrastructure is the variety of policies and practices put in place by different data custodians across the spectrum. One approach to overcoming this incongruence is to develop services to support different basic paradigms (McLeod, 2001):

• Common user authentication/authorization services for custodians who restrict access to particular users
• E-commerce services for custodians who charge for data or services
• Inexpensive mechanisms for custodians providing data fee of charge

For example, to meet the last paradigm, GeoGratis provides geospatial data free of charge through a single FTP/web access point <geogratis.cgdi.gc.ca>. There are also many other global initiatives, such as Digital Earth, the Global Disaster Information Network (GDIN), the International Steering Committee for Global Mapping (ISCGM) <www1.gsi-mc.jp/iscgm-sec/index.htm>, the International Geosphere-Biosphere Project and the United Nations Geographic Database Initiative, that seek to improve the use of geographic information. Even as the countries try to set up their own NSDIs and work towards an ultimate global SDI, there is a need to better understand the aims of these multiple initiatives and ongoing efforts to enable appropriate alignment of actions to minimize duplication and adopt common practices and principles (GSDI Conference, 2001).

5.3 Challenges for policy formulation

In general, key organizational issues related to data access in SDI development, which are of relevance to policy formulation, are as follows (McLeod, 2001):

• Ensuring that key government, commercial, and value-added data / related service providers are represented as stakeholders
• Collaboration of government data suppliers on coordinated, supportive policies that relate to spatial data access, including free availability of data, pricing, copyright and use/integration of e-commerce
• An access infrastructure and policy that does not impinge on stakeholders’ mandates
• Support to multiple levels of “buy-in” in the data access infrastructure, with a low barrier to entry
• Sustainable long-term business models

The outreach and capacity-building exercises that are essential, aside from the technical elements, also face many challenges, as ultimately everything depends on the willingness of concerned institutions and organizations to cooperate. Some of the major challenges facing the countries in general and developing countries in particular are (a) weak institutional coordination, resulting often in incompatible data structures and standards, (b) “stand-alone” concepts, limited to organizational requirements, (c) limited outreach and education, (d) lack of policy initiatives favouring sharing of and collaboration on geospatial data, (e) vertical communication within the organizations, limiting horizontal contacts across institutions, and (f) access hindered by lack of transparency, such as restriction to the availability of spatial maps (de Montalvo, 2001). Besides the above, a lack of quality manpower, unnecessary duplication of activities, lack of standardized metadata and poor documentation also add to the difficulties. Added to this, on the technical side, the inordinate delays in locating and harmonizing the “stand-alone” databases further complicate the task and increase the cost of making them interoperable. The developing countries in the region do realize these difficulties even as they make efforts to set up their SDIs. These present an opportunity with dynamic benefits that would grow over time, culminating in accelerated socio-economic development of the countries, with a reduction in schedule delays in the implementation of developmental projects. The various “lessons learned” in SDI developments in the international arena, briefly listed below, could provide a starting point as the countries develop their own SDIs, adapting them in tune with the specific political system and the social context (de Montalvo, 2001):

• Build a consensus process: build on common interests and create a common vision
• Clarify the scope and status of SDI
• Exchange best practices locally, regionally and globally
• Consider the role of management in capacity development
• Consider funding and donor involvement
• Establish broad and pervasive partnerships across private and public sectors
• Develop clearing houses and use open international standards for data and technology

Many countries in the region, Australia, India, Japan and Malaysia among them, have either set up or are in the process of setting up NSDIs. For example, in Australia the impetus was provided by the Australia – New Zealand Land Information Council (ANZLIC), the main governmental body for spatial data issues, with little involvement from industry stakeholders. In contrast, in Japan the establishment of a liaison committee among the ministries and agencies on GIS, as well the setting up of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure Promoting Association (NSDIPA) by private industries, is the hallmark of implementing a national SDI. India is in the process of setting up its own NSDI by a coordinated approach between various governmental departments, such as the Survey of India (SOI), the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) and others.

With more and more countries entering the data arena, ESCAP has a larger role to play in highlighting the need for the countries in the region to consolidate the spatial databases on a GIS platform linked through appropriate networking, towards the goal of implementation of national SDIs. Standards and models for SDIs need not be reinvented for each country. A joint approach and a common vision of providing SDIs would only save effort and expense. A synergistic approach among the countries in the region would also enable supporting infrastructure elements such as software clearing-houses and metadata structures. ESCAP could associate with other specialized agencies in organizing joint workshops, thus providing a forum for the stakeholders, in both the public and private sectors in the region, to share their mutual capacity-building experiences in positioning NSDIs and the related policy frameworks.

This exchange of “best practices” would go a long way in enabling the “have-nots” to understand and appreciate the intricacies involved while planning their own strategies for positioning SDIs. Globally, there are also initiatives to have “common denominator projects” (CDPs), designed to demonstrate the ability of spatial data and the NSDIs to improve decision-making in communities. These projects address many issues such as flood management, land-use analysis, and environmental restoration, to name only a few. ESCAP could keep track of the key developments at the international level, closely interacting with the international bodies and agencies involved in these exercises, and provide necessary advisory services to the countries in the region to enable them to plan their activities properly.