Editorial |
Do we need an SDI?
I had the opportunity to hear Ed Parsons at the GI Forum in Salzburg where he spoke on “Beyond maps: Building the annotated world”. Readers may recall that we had put up his interesting piece on “The creative destruction of GIS” in January 2010. In his talk at Salzburg he made a passionate plea for a more inclusive SDI which goes beyond maps and connects people, places and events through the geospatial web. In his view SDIs, SOAs and the like are dinosaurs. The present and future lies in the Cloud where an innumerable number of servers which everyone can access and contribute their geospatial value. He talked about a geospatial ecosystem in which data producers and users live in a harmonious and almost organic relationship. An SDI is an artificial construct that only looks at data organisation and not its use. Use implies not only wider access but also participation. On similar lines Edward Pickle from Open Geo talked about social networks for geospatial data. Number of hits and user votes would decide the reliability of the volunteered information. Both talks brought out two points. First, volunteered information is becoming a very important source of data and second, participatory SDI is the way to go. GSDI has also recognised this as a reality and had a session on volunteered information in GSDI 11 at Rotterdam. We need to take this movement forward. Governments will not listen so what we need is a peoples’ movement like Open Street Maps which was started by a student who could not get maps from the government and decided to do something about it. May be it is time that in a ‘government of the people, for the people and by the people’ the people decide what should be an SDI.
Prof Arup Dasgupta
arup.dasgupta@gisdevelopment.net |
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