SDI: An Introduction

Author: David Swann
Date: 16 February 2010 - 2 Comments

Tags: SDI, Spatial Data Infrastructure, economy, data

This is the first in a series of three blog posts introducing what I've been doing with the New Zealand Geospatial Office (NZGO) to start work on a Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) for New Zealand. First up, in this post I give a brief explanation of what SDI is and how it fits in the current New Zealand context.

For a preface to my involvement with this work, see the announcement made by Adam Cooper in early December about getting SDI underway.

So, what is SDI?

SDI can be thought of as a geospatial extension to the broader Internet. It provides a federated environment in which geospatial users can search for, discover and consume data from a wide range of providers. It is not a single government system. We can create authoritative government and agency portals within the broader SDI; these crystallise some degree of order out of the rather more free-wheeling SDI.

SDI comprises three roles:

1. users of data
2. providers of data
3. catalogues of data.

Looking at experiences in other countries, we can realistically expect SDI in New Zealand to eventually have many thousands of data sets with dozens of catalogues.

In the same way that an agency can't implement 'the Internet' (they can use Internet standards as they build an Intranet), an agency can't implement 'SDI' (they can use SDI standards as they build an Enterprise GIS to create their own subset of SDI).

Why is SDI important for New Zealand?

Geospatial information is increasingly important to the New Zealand economy yet one of the key characteristics of geospatial information is that it's expensive to produce. This tells us that we need to use and re-use this precious resource more efficiently and effectively. This is a key outcome of SDI.

SDI might be easier than we thought...

New Zealand is several years behind other nations in implementing SDI. It appears we have benefited from that delay in that all the standards needed to create SDI are now safely embedded in almost all geospatial technology, whether vendor products or open source. If we had embarked on SDI 10 years ago, the standards were emerging, risky and expensive to implement. Today, the standards are mature, widely accepted and already built into the geospatial products that we're already using.

I hope you find this introduction to SDI useful, whether you consider yourself an SDI expert or more of a novice! My next post will cover a couple of the gains and impacts for an agency wishing to participate in SDI in New Zealand.

What do you think some of the benefits SDI can offer? What do you see as some of the major difficulties of implementing SDI? Do you have any experience or opinions of other SDIs?

Post your thoughts below or contact us.

David Swann