Does a Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) make sense for small countries? After all, an SDI, like any other infrastructure takes financial investment, time and effort to build. And small countries might feel that they don't have the tax dollars to spend on esoteric-sounding "SDI". Karen Richardson and Alan Mills make the case for SDIs in Ascension Island, St. Helena, Rodrigues Island, Montserrat and the Caribbean's smallest country, St. Kitts & Nevis - Small Islands SDI (686KB PDF).Thursday, June 04, 2009
Tiny SDI
Does a Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) make sense for small countries? After all, an SDI, like any other infrastructure takes financial investment, time and effort to build. And small countries might feel that they don't have the tax dollars to spend on esoteric-sounding "SDI". Karen Richardson and Alan Mills make the case for SDIs in Ascension Island, St. Helena, Rodrigues Island, Montserrat and the Caribbean's smallest country, St. Kitts & Nevis - Small Islands SDI (686KB PDF).
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5 comments:
1) I don't know what a SDI is.
2) If a Spatial Data Infrastructure is a logical framework for storing and accessing geographic data across multiple units of an organization, I don't understand why the same framework (populated differently, given different conditions in the individual units) could not be used for multiple small islands. . . . . even in a centralized data warehouse, such as the OECS GIS and Remote Sensing Centre (which exists in Alternate Universe # 345-548).
3) In the specific case of small islands, in general I don't think that SDI or GIS produce cost-effective results unless there is a substantial change in traditional data access and freedom of information. In my experience (going back to a paper that Louis Potter of the BVI and I co-authored back in 1995), the BVI and Anguilla seem to have made such changes; other places, such as the USVI, where information from an automated cadastral information system was not even available to government-sponsored researchers, have not.
Bruce Potter
Island Resources Foundation
1. A good question for many persons. The USA describes its National SDI as "the technology, policies, standards, human resources, and related activities necessary to acquire, process, distribute, use, maintain, and preserve spatial data". Europe expresses its need for an SDI due to "fragmentation of datasets and sources, gaps in availability, lack of harmonisation between datasets at different geographical scales and duplication of information collection. These problems make it difficult to identify, access and use data that is available". And your simpler definition in #2 is fine too.
2. Well put. And hyper-leaps to Alternate Universe # 345-548 were unsuccessful.
3. I'd like to know what persons from Anguilla, the BVI and the USVI think about their SDIs or lack thereof?
Based on the definitions above, the BVI has some of the makings of a SDI; people, procedures and technology but the policies are lacking. GIS had advanced in the BVI since the last four years. The creation of a SDI is the next step. We have already adopted the ISO metadata standard and are currently uploading datasets to our Enterprise Server. The creation of a portal will follow. There is a draft policy of data sharing but this has to be approved by the Heads of the related Departments. This details the procedure for data sharing among the National GIS committee stakeholders in the first instance. The BVI is also now assembling its submission for the Global map of the world project. So with that said the SDI, NSDI and eventually GSDI is not a far way off.
Lisa Kay S Lewis GISP
BVI National GIS Coordinator
Good to see some debate on this issue. One point Lisa Kay is saying is the point I was trying to get across in the article - that often baby steps are needed but I also reiterate that often it is not so much the idea of a SDI that is important, it is identifying the uses of shared GIS data (e.g. conserving the mountain chicken) that create the need for the tools that an SDI create: the metadata, catalog and steerage that gives savings on all ready stretched budgets.
The debate Bruce and Louis started so many years ago is still the basis for so much of what needs to change in SIDS. Even in the islands Karen and I wrote about, some stakeholders feel excluded from access to the technology and data because they cannot work within the "market price" principal - the engineers, architects and surveyors can afford data but environmentalists, joe and jo public and NGOs cannot.
SDI in SIDS will rarely be the all singing all dancing clearinghouses either up and running or dreamed of (and I think more dreamed than realised), but by sharing experiences between these states, and demonstrating to policy and decision makers, we can keep taking the baby steps to make the systems work. Those SIDS who are believed to be lagging behind can then see if there are solutions elsewhere in the world, that they can adopt and adapt to.
Alan Mills
In the IEEE 2008 article Geographic Factors Complicating Hazard Responses on Small Islands Dr. Smith of the UNLV mentions that "Remoteness often also results in
a lack of essential baseline hazard
data" ... referring to spatial data.
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