The political, institutional, and cultural obstacles to GSDI are difficult and will take a long time to resolve. The technical issues are complicated but relatively simpler than the policy issues, and they are being addressed in ISO TC 211 and OGC through a cooperative step-by-step engineering process that breaks the problem down into solvable pieces. The problem of data content and metadata standards (which is not directly OGC’s focus) needs to be addressed through a concerted standards process that involves data coordination between local, national, and global agencies. But long before the data problem is under control, people will be using software that automatically finds and uses the data that comes closest to matching their needs.
E-commerce, the Web, the OpenGIS Specification, and new tools for data production will soon make commercial geodata of all kinds far more accessible, affordable, and widely used than today. Spatially enabled information devices with wireless internet links will fuel demand for data, which will lower prices and inspire data product differentiation. Much of the data will be different from the data we have grown accustomed to using. Computers will present it to us differently. Computers will use it, unbeknownst to the non-technical user, to provide very specific information or to control simple things. When you send email, you don’t care about servers, switches, routers, and protocols. Similarly, when your car tells you that the nearest pizza place is 1.3 kilometers ahead on the left, or when your backhoe tells you that you are dangerously close to a gas main, you won’t care about the data format or semantics (though someone will be making a living caring about them). Policies, organizational relationships, data standards, and financial and human resources geographic information are entering a period of radical change and reconsideration due to technological progress. Some of the GSDI issues that we focus on today will become less important over the next few years as commercially delivered interoperable technologies come into play.
This view of the growing role of the private sector does not mean that OGC thinks the group assembled for the third GSDI conference should abandon its quest. But the group needs to look carefully at the coming technological changes, which are fairly predictable, and the technology-induced changes that can be imagined, and think anew about which challenges they want to take on. It seems fairly clear that no viable organization will arise unless the organization is created with a specific mission focused on an area that is underserved. That might be education, or intellectual property rights related to geodata, or data coordination, or a kind of steering committee function, coordinating between other organizations working on GSDI-related issues. It could be simply an annual meeting of national mapping directors, convening to discuss and learn about matters of common concern, and to coordinate. We concur with Michael Brand that the best overall GSDI organization is not a single monolithic GSDI organization, but rather a well-coordinated group of organizations, each with a role to play in building and maintaining the GSDI. Thus a function and name like "coordinating committee" or "steering committee" might be most appropriate.
The group that has gathered in this and the two previous GSDI meetings could continue to convene meetings under its own auspices or it could convene under the auspices of the UN, or it could apply to become a new part of a larger, established international GI group with existing infrastructure, authority, liaisons, education programs, policy-proposing committees, and national, regional, and international meeting schedule (such as the ISPRS, which has recently broadened its mission to address all GI, not only org/images/).
If the group remains intact, either independently or under another organization, it will need to define itself by finding its niche, i.e. its unique mission and its positioning relative to other organizations that care about GI. (Please forgive us for not following the structure topics that were to be addressed in this paper – Membership, Leadership, Secretariat, Working Groups, Funding, Priorities, and GSDI3 Resolutions. They all depend on the organization’s niche and mission, which we don’t yet know.) Toward this end, the organization will need to define its modes of cooperation with the other GI organizations, including OGC.
This paper is supposed to address policy and organizational issues for a new organization. The policy and organizational issue for this "organization-to-be" that OGC is most qualified to address is the issue of how it should interface and cooperate with OGC.
It seems obvious that whatever path the new organization takes, all will benefit if the organization achieves strong cooperation with OGC. The more complete OGC’s network of participants and liaisons, the more robust, useful, and universal its interoperability specifications will become, which serves everyone’s vision of the GSDI. OGC has established itself as the industry’s geoprocessing standards organization (complementing ISO/TC 211, which works at a more abstract, non-commercial, higher level), and OGC is also the leading geoprocessing industry association, so it would not make sense to try to build a separate technology organization with a mission like OGC’s. That does not mean that the new organization should not try to build something that involves the private sector.
Most of the GSDI group no doubt understands what OGC is, but it is worth restating, particularly because OGC now has an expanded ability to perform testbeds and demonstrations. One of the strategic imperatives in working towards a GSDI is to give the community tools and examples that make the tasks of integration and interoperability easier. OGC is working, in cooperation with ISO TC211 and many others, to advance the promise of GSDI by concentrating on specification activity and related application-focused interoperability initiatives:
Specification activity: OGC’s Technical Committee special interest groups (SIGs) each address a particular set of requirements, and new SIGs can be created by interested groups of members. Because OGC is an international organization, its OpenGIS Specification is able to produce a global interoperability platform.
Interoperability Initiatives: Through its ability to organize special technology initiatives, OGC is more than a standards organization. OGC’s Interoperability Program supports Interoperability Initiatives that can have a variety of purposes related to helping organizations achieve interoperability and integration of GI into their information systems. An agency sponsor’s goal might be, for example, to hasten the transfer of technology to COTS solutions while maintaining mission critical functionality. A corporation might partner with other corporations to sponsor an initiative to hasten the maturation or acceptance of a particular standard necessary for opening up a new market. Either of these initiatives might involve testing, demonstration, prototyping and pilot development.
Familiarity with these two kinds of OGC activity may help the GSDI group focus its mission and programs in a way that fully leverages OGC as a resource.
OGC recommends that the GSDI group consider focusing its attention on a particular education program: Educating purchasing agents and other employees and officials who seek to integrate GI into new or existing information systems. Those who buy information systems for end-users – governmental, institutional, and commercial – play a key GSDI role, because their decisions determine whether or not the systems will interoperate and operate globally.
The organization’s product would be a high level reference model, a "GSDI Interoperability Framework," which would guide purchasing agents in specifying systems -- hardware, software, data, and perhaps other elements -- so that they would become an integral part of the GSDI. The new organization would assume the responsibility of persuading every government to expect vendors to subscribe to the GSDI Interoperability Framework. The new organization would, through a consensus process, determine the content of the GSDI Interoperability Framework, drawing on the work of OGC and other standards bodies, and cooperating with these partner organizations in a variety of programs. The GSDI Interoperability Framework would be the result of a number of consensus processes and would in this way stay above partisan vendor competition. It would potentially influence the funding available to countries from NGOs like the World Bank. Such NGOs might be a source of financial support for the organization. It would support or lead initiatives like Digital Earth. It would be a conduit for requirements to pass back into OGC, ISO, and other standards bodies.
The OpenGIS Specification and ISO metadata standards would be subjects of this group’s briefings and attendant documents. OGC’s vendor and integrator members would likely support such an activity, especially if it provided marketing opportunities for them. OGC’s university members would provide affordable and well-motivated expert instructors and researchers.
In an environment characterized by a proliferation of geoprocessing products and geodata products, the organization might serve as a kind of "GSDI consumers’ union," reporting on results of OGC Interoperability Initiatives, evaluating new products and applications and judging them by their contribution to the GSDI. It would counsel countries, through publishing or through more direct contact, on their acquisition of GSDI-related infrastructure such as networks, and on their plans for advancing cadastres or environmental programs. The coordinating group could have a role in standards politics, helping to focus issues and align national interests. It could help bridge gaps between local constituents and national or regional constituents, or, working with OGC, between users and providers of technology. It could inform the public at conferences or in special seminars. It could help professions and disciplines create structures of authority to develop and maintain profession-specific or discipline-specific sets of data schemas and metadata schemas that would be optimally consistent with more widely used schemas and consistent with OGC-derived tools for handling these schemas. As a steering committee or coordinating committee, it would be well positioned to spawn useful activities that are tangential to the main GSDI theme. For example, branching from environmental information systems and data content standards work , a committee of the group might begin looking at how the naming and specifying of physical infrastructure elements can support environmental standards. That is, work on best practices in the semantic part of information infrastructure might be a tool for influencing best practices in physical infrastructure.
The GSDI Interoperability Framework would perhaps do more to help the developing countries build their NSDIs than anything else that the GSDI community could do. Inherent in interoperability is the ability to start small and build incrementally, with each increment compatible with what was installed previously. It also happens that in the Internet age, it doesn’t matter where you are. Geodata and geoprocessing services located around the world will be as accessible to all. The net result will be affordable access to geodata and geoprocessing, in both developed and developing nations.