ABSTRACTS

Parallel Session 1.1 (Theater)
SDI Strategies

Clear Steps to SDI Building and INSPIRE Compliance - with Added Value (66)
Gearóid Ó Riain, Compass Informatics Limited (Ireland), Roger Longhorn (Belgium)

Perhaps what is important to know in regards to SDI, and specifically SDI legislative compliance such as INSPIRE, is the what, when, and how, but it is also of growing importance to consider what value we can obtain that goes beyond compliance. Given the changed world we live in we often need to have statutory drivers for much of our work, but also need return on investment beyond that. Add in the maturing of open source technologies and we have a changed world in our technology options too. Finally consider that in many organisations in-house resources are reduced and the importance of external reasonably priced services becomes apparent.
Based on these realities and changes, clear workflows towards establishment and compliance with the specific case of INSPIRE have been prepared that are used to guide organisations in developing a work programme that efficiently delivers compliance but also delivers value across the organisation and externally. These workflows are organised under the headings of Programme Management & Planning; Metadata, Network Services, and Data Services. Programme planning is key to getting it right first time and so emphasis is placed on an initial information audit and systems review, leading to a best-fit INSPIRE compliance work solution. This is then progressed through the other related workflows.
The compliance portfolio that has been formulated by Compass seeks to match each step of the workflows with a solution – the all important ‘how’. The ‘how’ is typically a mix of a human resources and technology solutions with emphasis placed on open source options but typically taking a hybrid approach, mixing open source and proprietary to get a best fit to user needs.
So out of this changing circumstance there comes opportunity – to be compliant with the ‘rules’, to get value beyond those rules, and to do so cost-effectively and reliably.

Implementing a Spatial Vision for Western Australia: Engaging Citizens through a Coordinated and Collaborative Approach to Spatial Information Management (9)
Darren Mottolini, Landgate, Ian Hyde, Lara Bandarian (Australia)

The Western Australian Land Information System (WALIS) has provided a focused and collaborative culture to spatial information management across the public sector in Western Australia (WA) for more than 30 years. WALIS was formed to provide a partnership between government, industry, education and community with the sole goal of furthering the geographic information value held within the state.
Over the last few years, WA has seen a growing need by the community and industry sectors for better access to current location based information in all areas of planning and decision making. This information need is now driving a new evolution to how information is created, managed, analysed and used within the state and why a supported common location based framework is required to underpin the information value chain.
Globally we have seen that fragmented collection, poor access and use of data can undermine the inherent value of information. Government is recognised as a major generator and collector of information and the Western Australian Land Information Authority (Landgate) along with the WALIS Office is leading a Location Information Strategy for WA that will see up to 80 per cent of government-owned data become spatially (location) referenced.
We know that by spatially referencing different data types of information about a particular location they can be compared or related to each other, collective understanding is possible and the power to make effective decisions significantly increase. As location information becomes increasingly integrated into business and society, this demand for value-added location-based data grows.
Landgate, as the lead agency for the Location Information Strategy in WA is using this demand to demonstrate that an economic benefit to the State exists by improving and expanding the use, distribution and creation of publicly-funded spatial information products and services. This vision will aim to leverage current investments such as the Shared Land Information Platform (SLIP) to ensure that data across government is created and collected through better coordination, meets current and future reporting requirements and a collaborative approach to managing and maintaining data is achieved. By implementing a Location Information Strategy new infrastructure development, data collection and use will no longer operate as closed systems, in effect removing the ‘silos’ that exists today and ensuring that data is regarded as an asset to be leveraged across government and industry.
This paper will explore the Strategy journey in WA and how technology is only a small component in facilitating a citizen centric, collaborative approach to information management. Building on the WALIS strategies of consultation with industry and government stakeholders will ensure the long-term strategy will service the needs of many sectors and citizens for effective development strategies of the future. Strategic planning, coordination and quality, real-time location information is the key.

Efforts and Activities to Make Data Accessible through Development of a National Geospatial Data Clearinghouse (88)
Jongikaya George, National Spatial Information Framework (South Africa)

Geographic or spatially related information is an investment for sound development. In response to this need for spatial information, the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform in South Africa, established a component in 1997: National Spatial Information Framework (NSIF), to direct the South African Spatial Data Infrastructure (SA: SDI). The NSIF is mandated by the Spatial Data Infrastructure Act (Act no. 54 of 2003) to develop an electronic metadata catalogue to allow users to discover and access spatial data held by other organs of State. The intention is not to create a single central database, but to link different databases, which are maintained by different data custodians using common standards.
An important element of a Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) is the provision of a facility that will enable users to discover spatial data and determine the quality of that data for use in their own systems and applications. The National Spatial Information Framework (NSIF) has been administering such a system, Spatial Metadata Discovery tool (SMD) over the past 3 years. The SMD work on a distributed metadata base nodes. The national metadata clearinghouses was developed to increase data sharing, data operability and avoiding parallel activities in production of spatial data was the reason for necessity of clearinghouse development.
Various open source subsystems were used and created to implement the system, which includes:
1. A Content management system, as the platform for development of the Portal
2. Geonetwork Open Source components to manage metadata and provide the basic harvesting and management functions
3. Geoserver, Postgres and other components to an integrated system for the management and discovery of metadata.
This paper focuses on the use of Open source technology in developing electronic metadata catalogue and the benefits of having such a system.

2010 - The Year to Celebrate Success for NSDI's or the Year to Return to the Drawing Board? (65)
Michael Jackson, Centre for Geospatial Science, University of Nottingham (UK), David Schell (USA), Fraser Taylor (Canada)

In August 2002 the US Office of Management and Budget issued its Circular A-16 which established a coordinated approach to electronically develop the National Spatial Data Infrastructure of the USA. The circular affirmed and described the National SDI as the technology, policies, standards, human resources, and related activities necessary to acquire, process, distribute, use, maintain, and preserve spatial data (http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/circulars/a016/print/a016_rev.html#background). Since then, the recognition of the economic and social need for countries to develop and implement policies for the efficient and coordinated management of their spatial data and services has become global and SDI’s at the national, regional and global level have evolved with increasing resolve and commitment. Many NSDI’s are now at advanced stages of implementation. The European Union “INSPIRE” directive for a European SDI came into force in 2007 and over 2009 and 2010 the EU Member States will be passing this directive into national law. So we could well be forgiven if in 2010 we were to relax and take the opportunity to celebrate a decade of progress.
But in this paper we argue that far from the complacency of success it is time to go back to the drawing board and re-evaluate what will be needed for spatial data infrastructures to be effective in the second decade of the millennium. Whilst SDI’s largely developed in the world of national and international politics and have required careful iteration of programs based on complex patterns of negotiation and compromise there has been rapid and disruptive technological developments in the commercial and mass-market sectors. So fast and far reaching have these developments been that highly structured, mature and institutionally constrained organizations have found it difficult to assimilate the impacts and respond at the same pace. A dynamic new “geoweb” challenges both the legacy geospatial technology domain and the world of institutionally driven SDI. For the future it is seeming increasingly likely that SDI and geospatial information and technology in general will become an integral part of a more holistic location-aware ubiquitous computing environment. The “new SDI” remains to be created, but it will surely assume Web 2.0 characteristics and geospatial information will be more ubiquitous, more dynamic, and not confined to the traditional geospatial applications. SDI, currently conceived as a bounded and mainly top down infrastructure that governments attempt to manage, will become an integral part of this new public-participatory ICT infrastructure, subject to the same market forces and technological dynamism that characterize the current ICT world.


Parallel Session 1.2 (Room 303)
SDI Applications: Environmental

Ontology-based Multi-Agent System Framework For Spatial Decision Support (26)
Chih-Hong Sun, Geographic Information Center, Chin-Te Jung (Chinese Taipei)

Decision makers of government and enterprise today are facing many difficult tasks such as climate change, natural disasters and economic crisis which are spatial in nature and involve many stakeholders. Intelligent spatial decision support systems (ISDSS) are the promising solution for these difficult tasks. This paper proposes an ontology-based multi-agent system framework to develop ISDSS efficiently and effectively. Our ISDSS is ontology-based which means our system is knowledge-based and can perform reasoning. Our system also uses multi-agent systems to hide the complexity of difficult tasks from the user; perform tasks on the users’ behalf; train/teach users; help multiple users share information; monitor events; and interact with a changing operating environment on behalf of the user.

Spatial tools for Conservation of Kenya's Biodiversity (108)
Lucy Waruingi, African Conservation Centre, David Western (Kenya)

Kenya is especially rich in biodiversity, which is vital for the well-being of people and our planet. Kenya’s protected forests, parks and reserves, the only areas expressly set aside to conserve biodiversity, cover 10% of our surface area. Though vital, the protected areas have inherent design shortcomings. Their boundaries do not encompass entire ecosystems and exclude a large portion of species and key biological hotspots. Further, recent studies find that wildlife populations and plant species in protected areas are declining as fast as adjoining non-protected areas. In short, protected areas provide neither the space nor the protection to sustain Kenya’s biodiversity. Many species face extinction and vital natural biological capital is rapidly disappearing.
Kenya’s economy is fueled largely by natural capital derived from sunlight, rather than by non-renewable fossil fuels. Its natural capital gives Kenya a chance to emerge as a leader in a post-oil economy driven by renewable energy, yet that over-use, land degradation and poor environmental governance are rapidly eroding natural capital. We face shortening drought cycles that will add to the disruptive effects of climate change. Despite the importance of Kenya’s biodiversity, we have yet to exhaustively inventory our species, appraise their value, or put in place a comprehensive framework to conserve them. The loss of diversity will impoverish humanity and threaten ecological services and planetary processes.
Several projects over the last 1 1/2yrs are using spatial tools and other applications to inventory Kenya’s biodiversity, value its worth, assess the environmental risks and define a comprehensive conservation framework. The success of these efforts is largely in the strategy of using local, regional and international networks to bring all relevant datasets and tools and working with institutions (governmental, non-governmental and local community institutions) to bring datasets together to map, assess and plan for Kenya’s biodiversity resources. This includes studies on species and environmental management, land fragmentation and impact of climate change on biodiversity and livelihoods. Preliminary results of these consolidated efforts are available with the final presentations scheduled to be made at a regional biodiversity workshop to be held in September 2010.

Developing of Coastal and Marine Environment Framework for the East Asian Seas Region (163)
Chandrasekar Jayaraj, National University of Singapore, Suresh Natesan, Kumaran Raju Durairaju (Singapore), Vellayutham Pachaimuthu, Ellik Adler (Thailand)

The development of the frame work for coastal and marine environment has been initiated to develop the East Asian Seas (EAS) Knowledgebase which serve as a one-stop-shop for accessing data and information on coastal and marine environment in the region at both regional and national levels. The development of the East Asian Seas (EAS) Knowledgebase has been initiated by Coordinating Body on the Seas of East Asia (COBSEA) in collaboration with Tropical Marine Science Institute (TMSI), National University of Singapore. The component of the EAS Knowledgebase include: (1) Development of a regional database on existing programmes, projects and activities; and (2) Development of a database at national level data and information regarding the coastal and marine environment. The key objective of the project is to develop coastal and marine environment framework to compile and dissemination of data and information over the internet in a secure manner so as to improve the accessibility to data and information pertaining to the coastal and marine resources. It will enables government departments, research institutes, private sector, marine scientists, educational establishments as well as the public bodies to have better access to marine and costal information. In order to achieve the objectives of the project, a generic template was developed for the collection of information on regional and national basis. Consecutively, first and second phase workshop was organized in 2007 and 2008 respectively to finalize the content of the template and the recommendations from both workshops were incorporated to make further improvement to facilitate more informative and comparable data collection from the COBSEA member countries. Guidelines for the collection of national data collection sheet have been developed to improve and strengthen the content of the national data collection sheet.
The contents of the regional and national activities knowledgebase include identification and collection of data/information from public sources such as web sites, published reports, guidebooks etc. A detailed internet search was carried out using keywords from the template to collect the information. In addition, reports and websites of government agencies, programmes and projects in the COBSEA member countries were consulted. The collected information was then organized using Microsoft Excel based on the template topics and sorted based on different data types such as text, documents, maps, metadata, and links to existing databases, and references to websites etc. Once uploaded to the EAS Knowledgebase database, the submitted data will be portrayed in the form of tables, graphs and online maps.
This paper depicts in detail the efforts in development EAS knowledgebase, data preparation and technology used for developing the system. The developed system is an integrated web based workflow application which will allow more interaction with country and regional representatives as well as other donors, in order to create, edit, manage and finally publish a variety of content that is data/information such as text, graphics, documents etc, whilst being validated by a centralized set of rules, process and workflows that ensure coherent, quality checked electronic content. The development of the developed system uses the open source content management system. The framework of the system includes PHP for application development and database MySQL. Additionally it is interoperable with GIS and other visualization systems.

Bioenergy Resource Modelling System - Putting OGC Web Services to Work (67)
Gearóid Ó Riain, Compass Informatics Limited (Ireland), Seth Girvin (France), Roger Longhorn (Belgium), Mike Wilson (Ireland)

An information system that consists of mapping, modelling and documentation tools has been constructed to enable the Irish Bioenergy Working Group to undertake an assessment of current bioenergy resources, usage, gaps and future opportunities, and to enable modelling of future scenarios and simulations. This task is both an interesting and challenging one, and one that illustrates the potential of geographic information technologies in integration of both data and predictive models from across organisations - in this case primarily from organisations in the agriculture, forestry, waste management, and environmental management sectors.
The system is modular in structure allowing further extension of functions or complexity of calculations, including those relating to the supply chain of bioenergy sources. It also incorporates open source and selected proprietary technologies and makes extensive use of standards based web services for serving of datasets into the system and potentially into other external platforms e.g. mobile or third party systems. The system forms an information portal with the mapping system supported by a parameter editing, documentation wiki, and a metadata section. The system also spawns related corporate map viewers in other energy areas including wind and geothermal energy.
The system has been developed under contract to Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) - Ireland’s national energy authority with a mission to promote and assist the development of sustainable energy. This encompasses environmentally and economically sustainable production, supply and use of energy, in support of Government policy, across all sectors of the economy. Its remit relates mainly to improving energy efficiency, advancing the development and competitive deployment of renewable sources of energy and combined heat and power, and reducing the environmental impact of energy production and use, particularly in respect of greenhouse gas emissions. SEAI, through its Low Carbon Technologies division has a significant role in the Bioenergy Working Group, which was set up by the Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources. This Group is charged with developing a roadmap to Ireland’s 2020 bioenergy targets.


Parallel Session 1.3 (Room 304)
SDI Legal, Policy, & Economic Issues

Towards a framework of standard licenses for geo-information?! (91)
Bastiaan van Loenen, Delft Univeristy of Technology, Frederika Welle Donker (Netherlands)

In the development and diffusion of major technologies, it is well known that standards provide an essential input, establishing compatibility or interoperability between components in the system (DTI, 2005). In addition, standards facilitate coordination and reduce complexity (Brunsson et al. 2000). Only after a standard has been adopted, the technology will thrive. Also in the geo-domain standardisation has an important role to play. Geo-standards are developed and approved at a global level by ISO and OGC. The OGC GeoDRM working group has researched a technical solution to implement a digital rights management system for geo-information since 2005 (see also Bishr et al. (2007)). Until today, GeoDRM has not been successful. This may be explained by the lack of a global framework of standard licences for geo-information. Licences remain difficult to understand for humans, let alone for computers. Integrating geo-information from multiple sources, with similar but different licences into one new application will be a timely effort and not necessarily a successful one. There is a clear need for a global standard for geo-licences. Only recently the development of a standard for geo-information licences is starting to emerge. Examples of promising initiatives aimed at standardising licences are found in the US (Onsrud et al., 2004), Europe (INSPIRE, 2009; www.seadatanet.org), Italy (Garretti et al., 2009), the Netherlands (Welle Donker et al., 2010), and at a global level (Onsrud et al., 2010). In this paper, we will explore the different proposals for standardising licences for geo-information and assess their potential to mature towards a global standard. Similar to the diffusion of products licensed with a creative commons licence, we believe that a global framework of standard geo-licences is a prerequisite for SDIs to successfully move towards a service oriented SDI in which multiple services can be integrated into new services without delay. Only then the service-oriented SDI will be able to thrive.

Thematic Network on Legal Aspects of Public Sector Information (LAPSI) (50)
Katleen Janssen, K.U.Leuven (Belgium), Gabor Remetey-Fülöpp (Hungary), Roger Longhorn (Belgium)

In March 2010, the Thematic Network on Legal Aspects of Public Sector Information started its work. The network is led by the Polititecnico de Torino and consists of 20 partners that are experts in several legal fields related to public sector information. The project addresses legal barriers to access and re-use, and strategies to overcome them, from the perspectives of information law, IPR, privacy, competition law, administrative and environmental law, and public procurement rules. The discussion on these topics is organised around cycles of seminars and conferences, intended to foster debate among the researchers and stakeholders in the field, complemented by dissemination exercises, awareness-raising events and contests. These will result in a set of policy guidelines, addressed to the European Commission, that will help all interested stakeholders in their access and re-use policies and practices. While these policy guidelines may in first instance be oriented towards the European Union, the participation of partners outside of the EU should also make them useful on a broader level.
While the LAPSI project will deal with many different types of public sector information, including cultural data from archives, libraries, scientific information, environmental information, etc., of course the established areas of PSI, such as spatial data, will play an important role and the participation of stakeholders in this field is very important for the success of the project. This presentation will highlight the objectives and activities of the thematic network, and invite stakeholders in the spatial data community to share their views on the legal priorities for the development of the legal framework for public sector information.

Legal Issues and Experiences from an Australia Perspective (908)
Anne Fitzgerald, Faculty of Law, Queensland University of Technology (Australia)

forthcoming

Towards Service Level Agreements in Spatial Data Infrastructures (85)
Bastian Baranski, con terra GmbH, Bastian Schäffer (Germany)

In the past, Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) as enabling platforms for Spatially Enabled Societies (SES) focused on the interoperable exchange of spatial data via open standards based (web) services. Since spatial data becomes more and more an important part of our daily life, the quality aspect of spatial services is of great importance. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are contracts between service consumer and service providers about offered and guaranteed service qualities. The integration of such contracts in today’s SDIs could be a substantial step towards SES in which spatial information is regarded as a common good that is made available to citizens and businesses in an efficient and economic manner. This chapter presents an approach for the seamless integration of SLAs in SDIs. The requirements for the integration of SLAs are analyzed and a classification of potential SLA elements for SDI services is provided. A SLA-aware architecture including a description of interactions between the different actors and entities is specified. Since guaranteed service qualities are monitored and SLA violations are reported to all contractual parties, the proposed architecture provides an appropriate tool for SDI service consumers and SDI service providers to manage SLAs. The presented concept is verified by a proofofconcept.


Parallel Session 1.4 (Room 305)
Geodata and Metadata Issues

Spatially Enabling 'Place' Information (35)
Stephan Winter, University of Melbourne, Rohan Bennett, Marie Truelove, Abbas Rajabifard, Matt Duckham (Australia)

Many attempts to embed the concept of ‘place’ into current location-based technologies and spatial data infrastructures have failed spectacularly. Resolving places to single georeferenced points has been identified as a major factor. The prevailing hypothesis is that more complex georeferenced descriptions of places will resolve the problem. This chapter refutes this hypothesis. It challenges it from five perspectives including issues related to: determining positional accuracy, defining vague and dynamic places, administering natural places with uncertain boundaries, supporting vanity and vernacular places, and representing the salience of places. These five perspectives demonstrate that while more complex modeling of place is necessary, it is only part of the solution. Successful spatial enablement of place will require other essential issues to be addressed including: combining absolute, relative, and visual accuracy definitions of place, using emerging sources of data (e.g. crowd-sourced) to develop dynamic descriptions of places, determining how to capture ‘places’ from remotely sensed data, incorporating vanity and vernacular places into spatial data infrastructures, and embedding measures of the salience of place into spatial data infrastructures. These findings are synthesized into a future research agenda in spatial data infrastructures, or spatial information science in general.

Tools to support Organisational Data Search and Discovery of Agricultural and Natural Resource Data in Victoria (74)
Stephen Williams, Department of Primary Industries Victoria, Christopher Pettit, Jonathan Hopley, Nathan Day (Australia)

Approaches to spatial data infrastructure are heavily dependent on quality metadata yet in complex multi-dimensional businesses such as government departments or agencies the location and governance of data assets and associated metadata can be unclear. In this situation finding the right person is often paramount to obtaining or not obtaining metadata and ultimately data. The careful design of a conceptual framework to support an organisation’s search and discovery of metadata can greatly assist defining and refining governance and management activities around data assets and the capture and creation of metadata. This paper describes the formulation and application of a data organisation framework for the Future Farming Systems Division within the Department of Primary Industries (DPI) in Victoria, Australia. In this paper we present two data search and discovery tools used to map and document DPI’s agricultural and natural resource data sets. The first tool known as Datamap, supports both the physical and thematic search for data. Datamap exists as a web tool comprising graphics and hyperlinks to support navigation to data descriptions and custodians. The second tool known as the Metadata Entry System Tool (MEST) is an implementation of the Open Geospatial Consortium endorsed tool GeoNetwork to capture and manage metadata. Currently there are almost 200 metadata entries for a number of agricultural and natural resource datasets and instances of spatial models applied in Victoria, Australia.
With the prolific growth of the data assets in the agricultural and natural resource sectors there is a need for such data search and discovery tools to support a number of end users including: policy-makers, investors, land managers, researchers, extension staff and industry. In this paper we report on our experiences in developing and applying the Datamap and MEST in Victoria. In undertaking this research we have found that the major issues are not with technology but rather in the implementation of processes and cultural changes required to maximize returns on investment in data and information.

Effective Topological and Structural Compression of GML Coordinate Data (96)
Harshita N.N., International Institute of Information Technology, K.S. Rajan (India)

Spatial data infrastructure (SDI) is a framework which mainly focuses on bringing together geospatial data providers and agencies to share data and services thus reducing the redundancy in data collection and improving the planning and decision making process. Geography mark-up language (GML) has come to stay as the standard for these SDI’s. GML is mainly used for storage, exchange and querying of geographic data. The standard GML format for storage is in text format leading to large data sizes, which if reduced will improve both the storage and its management. Also, GML data compression will aid in higher information transfer and allow the users for faster access & quicker visualization. Recent works on GML compression have largely focused on structure of data, while this paper proposes a method involving both topological and structural characteristics of the data. The topological relationship in the data is exploited for reduction in its size by eliminating the data repeats. In addition, to achieve a lossless compression and for easy storage and retrieval of the complete data, a tree based data structure is proposed to represent the coordinates which further helps in reduction of the overall data size. The results show that this method achieves a compression percentage of 50% to 70% for datasets ranging from 244 to 16000 KBytes.

Real-time Positioning Infrastructure to Support NSDI (910)
Victor Khoo, Singapore Land Authority (Singapore)

The Singapore Satellite Positioning Reference Network, SiReNT was implemented by Singapore Land Authority (SLA) in 2006. This Continuously Operating Reference System (CORS) has been in operation for more then 3 years and has gained much recognition as the authoritative Differential GPS (DGPS) infrastructure in Singapore. A new initiative known as the Singapore Geospatial Collaborative Environment or SG-SPACE was launched in April 2008 as the Singapore's National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI). This is a cross-agency program spearheaded by the SLA together with the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA), aims to create a sustainable environment where geospatial data is interoperable, accessible and usable by agencies in their day-to-day operations. As a nation-wide system, SiReNT plays a significant role in SG-SPACE as it is the national geographic reference frame which provides homogeneous coordinates system for a variety of positioning and geospatial needs. The user base has grow to more then one hundred for applications in geodetic survey, land survey, mapping, GIS data acquisition, assets management, engineering positioning, vehicles tracking, monitoring etc. This paper describes important roles of SiReNT infrastructure in supporting the SG-SPACE.


Parallel Session 1.5 (Room 308)
Technical Committee Round Table
Greg Yetman, CIESIN (US)

Calling all conference attendees interested in technical implementation issues. The GSDI Technical Committee provides continuous observation and review of technical issues affecting the development of local to global spatial data infrastructures. This meeting will focus on high-level technical issues related to SDI implementation, including interoperability issues amongst various suites of standards, technical barriers, and gaps in standards. Priority activities for the next year of the committee will be discussed and set. Please review the tentative workplan if possible before attending the session. We hope to have a lively discussion.


Parallel Session 2.1 (Theater)
SDI Experiences: National

Romanian GeoPortal - A Catalyst for the National Spatial Data Infrastructure Activities (3)
Cristina Oana, Esri, Cristian Vasile, Mihai Busuioc, Victor Grigorescu, Ileana Spiroiu (Rumania)

The Romanian GeoPortal is designed to facilitate the discovery and exchange geospatial data resources to a broader community of users. By the end of 2009, the National Center for Geodesy, Cartography, Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing completed a complex project which is a major milestone of the NSDI building efforts compliant with the INSPIRE.
These efforts will ensure the initial release of the Romanian GeoPortal by the National Agency for Cadastre and Real Estate. A centralized national metadata system and the national geographic data system based on a uniform reference data model and standards are provided via the Romanian GeoPortal that will go live in 2010. The first version of the Romanian GeoPortal provides access to the following resources: Romanian Base Map-TopRo5, at 1:5.000 scale, orthophotos at 1:5.000 scale, raster datasets including scanned maps, topographic maps and digital elevation models. Geographic data available covers most of the themes of the INSPIRE Annexes I and II.
The Romanian GeoPortal connect users to other databases, services and geoportal applications and serve as a catalyst for advancing Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) activities in Romania. The associated growth in geospatial data collection activities by the National Agency for Cadastre and Real Estate and its subordinated institutions and other government organizations has a real potential to improve decision making process and operations at all national levels.
The major functionalities of the Romanian GeoPortal will allow end users to:
• Discover and select geospatial information resources that are of particular interest to them.
• Preview live data or maps maintained on a web-accessible server.
• Make maps that combine geospatial information produced by others using a variety of map viewer technologies.
• Obtain geospatial resources provided by other data producers.
• Search and discover metadata records directly from a variety of external applications
• Subscribe and receive automatic notification of new geospatial data resources that meets user-specified criteria
• Publish and expose their own geospatial information for discovery by other users
• Register as a portal user.
The Romanian GeoPortal implements a framework that allows for discovery, query, and use of geospatial data and services that:
• is standards-based, built on the existing information technology standards and ISO and OGC specifications
• is open/interoperable, allowing choice of databases, hardware, networks, GIS software and web browsers
• creates horizontal and vertical integration opportunities to discover and use of geospatial data and web services
• is scalable to millions of users
• facilitates ISO/TC 211 compliant metadata tool use
• is extensible to include government ministries and departments as well as non-governmental and private sector participants
The deployment of the Romanian GeoPortal will improve knowledge sharing, reduce duplication of effort, direct people toward the best available data, and improve the overall quality of geospatial data and information of the National Spatial Infrastructure.

The way INSPIRE Contributes to European Spatial Planning (170)
Mauro Salvemini, President EUROGI, University of Rome (Italy)

Spatial planning has a crucial role in the context of social, political, economic and environmental issues. Sustainable planning addresses the environment where people live and work, the location of social and economic activities, the way in which the resources we possess are exploited, etc. Spatial planning acts in bottom-up and top-down directions between all levels of government. National, regional and local authorities face important challenges in the development of territorial frameworks and concepts every day

Colombian Earth Observation Program and the Implications for the National Spatial Data Infrastructure: Technical and Political Challenges (171)
Lilia-Patricia Arias, Agustin Codazzi Geographic Institute (IGAC), Ivan-Dario Gomez (Colombia)

The Colombian government established two strategies to ensure the development and use of geospatial technologies: the Colombian Spatial Data Infrastructure –ICDE and the National Earth Observation Program - PNOT, which were approved by the President of the Republic and the Board of Ministers. On the one hand, the National Geospatial Information Policy - PNIG (Conpes 3585, 2009) formulates the guidelines to strengthen production, sharing, access and use of geospatial information to consolidate ICDE as the mechanism to integrate policies, standards, organizations and technological resources to support decision making in all the topics of public policy. Bearing in mind that imagery is a fundamental dataset defined by ICDE, the PNIG established the consolidation of the National Repository of Imagery – BNI to optimize the inversion of government in acquisition and use of remote sensing images. On the other hand, the Colombian Space Commission promotes the knowledge about the Earth and space through the use of satellite technologies and information with the aim of increasing productivity, efficiency and competitiveness of several sectors that request geospatial information to support sustainable development. In this context, the PNOT (Conpes 3683, 2010) sets up a long time strategy to implement and Earth Observation Satellite program and the consequent harmonization with ICDE policies and information management issues. Taking into account the considerable amount of remote sensing data that will be provided by the PNOT and the need to implement the PNIG guidelines to implement applications of geospatial information in infrastructure and transportation, environmental management, mining and energy, climate change, planning and land management, socio-economic analysis and defense matters, ICDE is facing challenges regarding political issues such as the definition of responsibility, sharing procedures, licensing, open access to products and services and prices of value-added products. Since a technical perspective, ICDE should identify institutional projects that require imagery in order to promote the consolidation of common components related to the production of new fundamental datasets, standardization, interoperability, service architecture and e-government, among others. In this sense, the consolidation of geospatial information society in Colombia depends on the coordinated implementation of ICDE and PNOT that encourage a knowledge management program and applications for sustainable development.

Application of Global Map for Global Issues (136)
Yoshikazu FUKUSHIMA, Geospatial Information Authority of Japan, Takayuki NAKAMURA, Hidehisa TAKAHASHI, Noriko KISHIMOTO, Shuhei KOJIMA (Japan)

The Global Mapping Project aims to develop Global Map which is digital geo-information framework of the whole land area of the globe through international cooperation of National Mapping Organizations（NMOs）of the world. As of 1 April 2010, 164 countries and 16 regions participate in the project, which covers 97% of the whole land area. The objectives of the project are to contribute to solving global environmental issues, achieving sustainable development, and solving other global issues such as mitigating large scale disasters. Global Map is digital geographic datasets of the whole globe with consistent specifications. The data is composed of eight layers: Boundaries, Drainage, Transportation, Population Centers, Elevation, Land Use, Land Cover and Vegetation. Global Map version 1, which includes Global Land Cover and Vegetation (Percent Tree Cover) data developed by satellite remote sensing, was released in 2008. The data are to be updated every five years.
Global Map data can be used to predict, assess, prepare for and cope with global issues by combining with other spatial data. There are a lot of potential Global Map applications in various fields. In particular Global Map could contribute to sound decision-making in climate change. Global Map Land Cover data is introduced as an example of international Land Cover dataset in the IPCC Guidelines for Green House Gas (GHG) inventory in United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) processes. The data can be used for calculation of emissions and removals of GHGs as well as its supplementation and cross-checking, especially in the countries where statistics and geographic information are not well developed.
Another field of Global Map application is mitigation of natural disasters. Global Map Land Cover and Elevation data are used for a flood analysis system. The former is used for parameter setting such as roughness and surface permeability, and the latter is used to create a basin boundary and a water flow network. And the geographical feature of disaster hit area that GM describes can be used to evade secondary disaster and to efficiently aid victims. These maps are distributed to all over the world through the internet such as the ReliefWeb of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA).
Thus, Global Map will help people in relevant fields by providing basic geographic information. This report presents cases of application of Global Map data described above.


Parallel Session 2.2 (Room 303)
SDI Applications: Environmental

Global Environmental Information Networks - Abu Dhabi's Eye on Earth Summit (99)
Mark Sorensen, Abu Dhabi Global Environmental Data Initiative - Environment Agency Abu Dhabi, Anil Kumar (United Arab Emirates)

The world today is facing unprecedented environmental problems such as climate change, biodiversity loss and land degradation, spanning borders and continents. The international community therefore needs sustained efforts to address the problems, reverse negative trends, and support sustainable and equitable development. The provision of timely and quality-assured data and information for assessing the state of the environment and the pressures acting upon it is a fundamental first step. This enables policy-makers to decide on appropriate measures for protecting the environment at the relevant level – global to regional to local, and to monitor the effectiveness of policies and measures implemented.
Various stakeholders are involved at different stages of the solution process ranging from the scientific community to policy-makers, industry leaders, the donor community and the UN family. However environmental data and information tends to be fragmented across many different institutions operating at different scales under different mandates and in different geographic domains. The problem of a proliferation of disparate systems must be addressed through a federated approach. Partnerships and networking are crucial in supporting the collection and organization of environmental data and information across different themes and at different geographic scales. Strong emphasis must be placed on capacity development in developing countries so that institutions, systems and networks are strengthened to support environmental decision-making.
A global environmental information network would revitalize and strengthen multilateral cooperation among a wide array of stakeholders to integrate existing environmental information systems and networks, and build new ones where appropriate, to keep the world environmental situation under continuous review. This would be achieved by integrating existing environmental information systems and networks and building new ones where appropriate, building capacity, and taking advantage of cutting edge information and communication technologies.
The Eye On Earth Summit – Abu Dhabi 2010 will convene the primary policy and technical actors from around the world, build consensus regarding the way forward, and establish mutual commitments for doing so. This Summit will build on several decades of wide ranging initiatives such as EIONET, GSDI, GEO/GEOSS, SERVIR, USSDI, and others, related to the effective development and utilization of environmental information. The Summit will leverage the aligned interests of existing national, regional and international environmental information federations, latest technological developments and capacity building worldwide, the International Environmental Governance (IEG) agenda, and the continued commitment and support of the Abu Dhabi Global Environmental Data Initiative (AGEDI), established by the United Arab Emirates in 2002. The Summit is expected to:
• Strengthen, synergise, and extend a global process to bridge the environmental knowledge gap and provide information for decision-making;
• Reinforce multilateral policies and institutional arrangements to interlink environmental information systems and networks;
• Support technical cooperation to accelerate the building of an integrated global environmental information infrastructure;
• Accelerate capacity building and technology support programmes around the world to further close the gap between developed and developing nations;
• Strengthen access to resources to support developing countries.

When Geometry Meets Wiki: Spatial Annotation on the SDI Portal for Improved Disaster Risk Information (77)
Trias Aditya, Universitas Gadjah Mada (Indonesia), Rob Lemmens (The Netherlands)

The current state of research progress in Public Participation GIS sees Web 2.0 technology as a useful utility to realize the potential use of user-generated data for better planning and responses in many application domains such as disaster risk reduction. However, problems arise as soon as user-generated data are to be used as decision-support information. The problems relate with strategies to handle user-generated data. A common approach in recent wiki maps is to facilitate community members to express their ideas, remarks, comments, and arguments as spatial annotations on top of a map. As users complete their participation, user-generated geometries and their related annotations are produced. User-generated annotation often are unstructured and difficult to be systematically organized to support spatial analysis required in decision-making processes. This paper aims to deal with the challenges. The paper presents a technical framework to improve the usefulness of spatial annotations for further GIS analysis in order to reach informed decisions. The main focus of the study is on the development of a community-based disaster risk map through a Spatial Data Infrastructure initiative. A key challenge that will be dealt with in this paper is the handling of user-generated annotations related to feature geometry. The paper focuses on the utilization of semantic web annotation to provide structure to the user-generated annotations stored in the server. The strategy is to integrate the benefits of Semantic Web technology and Web 2.0 for facilitating ease of interaction and ease of integration between user-generated annotations and authoritative disaster-risk related data, including spatial data from various agencies, for generating a community-based disaster risk map. The portal takes advantages from the availability of geospatial web contents accessible through the SDI initiative. For this purpose, the portal makes use of spatial databases to store user-generated geometries and employs RDF data and RDF queries to select, relate, and integrate user-generated annotations with other relevant risk information. In order to exemplify how the method can work, a geo-community portal, implemented as an AJAX application and delivered as Web 2.0 technology, is presented. The technical framework and examples presented in this paper contribute to the development of useful and usable methods to support spatially-enabled community in dealing with local and national urgent agenda that rely on community involvement and that require accurate decision-making.

The Integration of Geospatial Information in EVE for Greenery Management in NParks (151)
Chin Peng Tan, National Parks Board (Singapore)

National Parks Board (NParks) manages intensively 1.3 million trees located in 300 parks and on more than 2400 ha of roadsides. From 1999 to 2009, all geospatially related trees, biodiversity, parks facilities information and records were managed at individual decentralised client based applications and geo database. Other data such land use consultation, park development, parks and greenery, contract management and development regulatory data were only stored in oracle database and not geo-spatially referenced.
In 2009, NParks undertook a business process re-engineering and made a strategic decision to integrate all geospatial data and convert other non-spatial data into spatial data onto a centralized platform that is made accessible to all NParks staff. As a result, a new web based management system with centralized geo-database and SQL server database, known as EVE was developed and implemented. EVE integrates all operational geospatial data such as locations of trees (including tree inspection records), Parks development site plan, Parks facilities , biodiversity data, and conservation data etc. These geospatial data are our valuable garden city assets and these are all hosted in a centralized geo-database in EVE and then made accessible to all NParks’ staff.
EVE also provides a platform for mobile tree inspection. It enhances the capabilities of GIS data collection on tree data and allows more attributes to be captured and maintained. NParks field officers use ruggerdised UMPCs or more commonly referred to as dataloggers, equipped with ArcPad 8.0, ESRI’s mobile software, to enable the logging of data such as the tree species, the specific location and health assessment of each tree. Once data is entered and synchronised, it integrates with the geodatabase to generate a unique ID for each tree and stores it in the EVE geodatabase. Using the weather related geospatial data (rainfall and wind speed records) and the data collected, geo-statistics and geospatial analysis can be conducted to generate geospatial information on the tree failure profile, for an example, to derive the top five most storm-vulnerable tree species planted in Singapore. We can also obtain clear maps showing the geo-referenced failure hotspots in EVE. This enables parks manager to make better informed decisions on arboriculture management such as tree species selection, on when to schedule pre-emptive pruning prior to monsoon seasons, etc.
As mentioned earlier, EVE enables geospatial capabilities that were not previously available. One example is the Contract management module. All contract related documents and information are all spatially linked to managed areas.
NParks and other government agencies in Singapore share information through a common GIS sharing platform called SG-SPACE. With the improved geo-spatial infrastructure offered in EVE, NParks is able to contribute more geo-spatial related information or layers to SG-SPACE.

Environmental Modeling for Geospatial Risk Assessment of Wind Channels in an Urban Landscape - Marina Bay (140)
Tian Kuay Lim, National Environment Agency (NEA), Wei Ren Quah, Haiyan Miao, and Kee Khoon Lee, Gary Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC), A*Star, and Durairaju Kumaran Raju, Tropical Marine Science Institute (TMSI), National University of Singapore (Singapore)

The objective of this work is to develop a coupled atmospheric and urban model, based on geospatial and geographical information, to conduct a case study for the risk assessment of urban wind channels caused by severe atmospheric conditions in highly urbanized Singapore. A very high resolution mesoscale spectral model (MSM), based on the National Centers for Environmental Predictions (NCEP) Regional Spectral Model, has been adapted and calibrated for Singapore In particular, it is been applied to Marina Bay, to downscale hourly weather fields at 1km spatial resolution for Singapore. The downscaled weather fields are fed into a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) urban model as the initial and boundary conditions for the urban domain. Leveraging on the CFD modeling, a full wind and pressure 3D gridded field can be obtained in the chosen area. Inputs of building geometry in Geographic Information System (GIS) form are required, and the two-dimensional outlines are then extruded based on the building heights to form three dimensional buildings. Information regarding wind gusts that was tuned using the MSM can then be identified at localized levels. To demonstrate the robustness of the MSM, we conducted studies on the performance of the MSM in simulating the various tropical weather conditions, ranging from monsoons to squalls, in Singapore. With the hourly weather fields at 1 km spatial resolution, the coupled MSM-CFD model is then used to study wind channels on urban biodiversity, particularly on tree failure, in the urbanized Garden City, Singapore. The MSM-CFD model indicated a correlation between the predicted strong wind gust area and tree failure recorded over the urbanized Marina Bay. Based on the performance of the MSM and the results of the study of wind channels on urban biodiversity using the coupled MSM-CFD model, we conducted a risk assessment study of urban wind channels over the urbanized Marina Bay caused by a tropical cyclone, Vamei, which traversed close to Singapore on the 27 Dec 2001.


Parallel Session 2.3 (Room 304)
SDI Institutional, Administrative, & Management Issues

Netherlands Experiences in Spatial Enablement (980)
Doreen Burmanje, Chairman Executive Board, Cadastre, Land Registry and Mapping Agency (Netherlands)

A Registry Based Governance Model for Spatial Data Infrastructures (40)
Paul Box, CSIRO Land and Water, Abbas Rajabifard (Australia)

Broadly, governance provides an overarching and enabling decision-making and accountability framework within which a community co-operates to achieve collective goals. With the increased social (institutional) and technical complexity and inter-relatedness of SDI initiatives, the provision of a governance framework becomes a significant challenge.
SDI in common with other information infrastructures are recognized as socio-technical endeavours and as such, have significant governance challenges in both the socio and technical domains. This paper presents a model of governance that is designed primarily to address the technical governance challenges associated with information infrastructure design, and evolution. The model is based on ISO 19135 Geographic Information – Procedures for item registration. This ISO standard articulates the use of registers, a set of defined roles and procedures for submission and registration of artefacts. The registers, procedures and roles related to registration of information artefacts about which a community cares and which need to be published, managed, discovered and used, provides the conceptual basis for the technical governance model, The paper discusses the practical application of the model in order to demonstrate its applicability in managing the relationships between different components and systems in societies and its value to facilitate spatially enablement.

A National Grid Cell Data Infrastructure: Significance of a Hierarchical Grid System and Cooperative Research Centre (78)
Tai Chan, Department of Sustainability and Environment, Victoria, Glenn Frankish, Stephen Farrell (Australia)

This paper documents the case to date of the development of National Data Grid as a grid cell (also called raster) data component of the Australian Spatial Data Infrastructure. In the process the strategies used by the Project Control Group to overcome the technical and institutional hurdles were described in the perspective of the processes of spiral model of software development and organisational innovation diffusion respectively.
The Project is currently at the stage when it has to consolidate the various prototypes developed and tested by the project participants and promote the end product to strategic stakeholders in Australia. The purpose is to generate enough interest in the National Data Grid for it to be implemented as a production multi-participant system and as an integral part of the Australian Spatial Data Infrastructure. The lessons learnt to date point to two key elements of a strategy needed for the success of this stage. These elements are the Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information and a grid cell indexing system called the National Nested Grid, which are deemed to play a key role in promoting the adoption of the infrastructure.

Agent Based Cellular Automata Model for Simulating Urban Growth Phenomena (47)
Hamid Kiavarz Moghaddam, University of Tehran, Farhad Samadzadegan (Islamic Republic of Iran), Abbas Rajabifard (Australia)

Cities are complex systems that arise through a complex interaction of many factors. As a result, policy makers and planners often face tremendous difficulties in decision making with a lack of vision into the future of urban growth. Due to the complexity nature, cities can be best understood by spatial dynamic modeling using complex system tools. Cellular Automata are discrete dynamical systems whose behavior is completely specified in terms of a local relation. Previous studies on urban modeling using cellular automata have addressed various aspects of urban development. However, most of these studies regard urban development as a binary process of non-urban to urban conversion conducted under the paradigm of crisp set theory. The multiple agent systems (MAS), has also been adopted for use in urban modeling. The multi-agent systems are designed as a collection of interacting autonomous agents, each having its own capacities and goals, but together they relate to a common environment. This type of model operates on the same principles as the cellular automata model with each agent being considered as individual autonomous agent-automata and their states generally represent some agent-based characteristics. However, distinctions between cellular automata and multi-agent systems exist in a number of ways. One distinction is that in the multi-agent system, the basic unit of activity is the collection of agents representing individuals, developers, planners, or government decision-makers. The agents are autonomous in that they are capable of making independent actions, their activities are directed toward achieving defined tasks or goals, and their influence on the environment can be at different scales. Another distinction between the cellular automata and the multi-agent systems is that cellular automata are fixed cells in the CA lattice, whereas the agents in the multi-agent systems are dynamic and mobile entities that can move within the spaces that they “inhabit” .These agents also can process and transmit information while they move along the spaces and pass the information from one agent and environment to another in their neighborhood. Consequently, the neighborhood relationships in agent automata are also dynamic: when individual agents alter their locations in space, their neighborhood relationships also change. This modeling technique offers more flexibility as their agents not only carry the internal feature of the automata and the mechanism of transmitting information to its neighbors; they also represent the behavioral characteristics or can even simulate Intelligence. Therefore, this type of modeling approach also offers attractive features in urban modeling. However, in practice, the agent-based models are less popular compared to CA-based models in urban simulation, and most of the agent-based models developed in urban modeling were actually formulated as CA and reinterpreted as multi-agent systems.
This paper developed an Agent model of urban development based on the principles of cellular automata and agent reasoning system. With agent reasoning system, the state of a cell is associated with a grade of membership representing the stage a cell is in its urban development process. In addition, the use of agent CA makes the definition of transition rules more close to human decision-making behavior. Advantages for modeling urban development also come from integrating the model in a geographical information system. With this integration it is easy to control the performance of the model, visualize its output and calibrate it. In this paper CA urban growth simulation and prediction of Tehran over the last four decades succeeds to simulate specified tested growth years at a high precision level. Some real data layer have been used in the CA simulation training phase such as 1990 while others used for testing the prediction results such as 2001. Next step includes running the developed CA simulation over classified raster data for forty years in a developed .An ArcGIS extention has been developed to define a set of rules and calibrated based on real urban growth pattern. Uncertainty analysis is performed to evaluate the precision of the simulated results as compared to the historical real data. Evaluation shows promising results represented by the high average accuracies achieved. Some scenarios have been tested and selected a suitable scenario with high precision. The average precision for the predicted growth images 1975 and 2001 is over 80 %. Modifying Agent CA growth rules over time to match the growth pattern changes is important to obtain accurate simulation. This modification is based on the urban growth relationship for Tehran over time as can be seen in the historical raster data. The feedback obtained from comparing the simulated and real data is crucial in identifying the optimal set of Agent CA rules for reliable simulation and calibrating growth steps.

Unconfirmed
Name/affiliation/country


Parallel Session 2.4 (Room 305)
Geodata and Metadata Issues

Visual and GIS-suitable 3D City Models for Sustainable Planning and Spatial Data Infrastructures (126)
Kilian Ulm, COWI A/S (Denmark)

Highly accurate 3D city models derived by stereo feature extraction (photo-grammetry) are becoming an important subject for Spatial Data Infrastructure initiatives. These 3D city models have to be visually appealing for sustainable urban planning and city marketing, but also need to fulfil the user’s re-quirement to perform analysis and queries within his Geographic Information System. At COWI, we deliver building-oriented 3D city models by integrating the official 2D footprints from the cadastre and calculate useful geometric attributes like volume, slope, surface area etc for each building. In addition to such attributes, unique ID’s are assigned to all buildings. Therefore the existing 2D and the new 3D data are consistent and the added value of using the data in a GIS is significant.
COWI creates reality-based 3D city models using its in-house developed soft-ware and QC tools and therefore can easily adapt or extend the production method according geographic distinctions and special client- or market-related requirements. The 3D data is conform to the CityGML standard accepted by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and detailed roof structures including dormer windows and chimneys (level-of-detail 2) or even façade details (level-of-detail 3) with accuracies of 30cm or better are derived photogrammetrically from stereo aerial images. The 3D city models are provided in CityGML or Geodatabase format and therefore can be stored and managed in a relational database via interfaces like ArcSDE, which makes them suitable for Spatial Data Infrastructures. Furthermore the 3D models can be presented in an impressive real-time web-visualization using Skyline Soft-ware.
At the GSDI 12 World Conference we will present the latest results of our pro-jects for The Centre of GIS in Qatar, for the Principality of Monaco and the Canton of Geneva in Switzerland:
Monaco 3D: http://www.cowi.com/menu/projects/society/mappingandgeodata/Pages/3DcitymodelofMonaco.aspx
Geneva 3D: http://www.cowi.com/menu/projects/society/mappingandgeodata/Pages/3Dmapping.aspx

The Global Roads Open Access Data Set (gROADS): Pilot Efforts to Develop Improved Roads Data (104)
Alex de Sherbinin, CIESIN, Columbia University, Gregory Yetman, Matthew Steil (USA)

The International Council for Science’s Committee on Data for Science and Technology (ICSU-CODATA) Global Roads Data Development Working Group is releasing the Global Roads Open Access Data Set (gROADS) version 1 in 2010. As part of the overall effort, the CODATA working group has experimented with a variety of approaches to develop new data and to incorporate existing data, particularly for least developed countries where data are often of poor quality. This paper briefly presents the goals of gROADS, and then describes efforts to extract roads from ASTER imagery and to acquire new data using Cybertracker enabled PDAs using the UNSDI-Transportation model. This is followed by a review of other efforts to acquire roads data, including “crowd sourcing”, manual and semi-automated extraction from different remote sensing data sources, data fusion, and GPS tracks. In each instance the pros and cons of the approaches are reviewed and sample results are presented.

Developing a Map Updating Methodology for Geospatially Enabling Isfahan Metropolis in Iran (97)
Maryam Amini, Deputy of planning, research, information and communication technology, Isfahan municipality, Davod Shojaee, Saeed Nadi, Esmaeil Adili, Morteza Sadeghi (Islamic Republic Of Iran)

Accessing the up-to-date spatial data is one of the critical requirements of different departments of a municipality in performing daily activities as well as delivering the appropriate services to the citizens. Updating the spatial data is also one of the key prerequisites to approaching the e-municipality, automating the services, providing the content of information systems and also updating these systems. In this context, due to the rapid changes in an urban society, maintaining the spatial data and maps up-to-date needs a well-defined and accurate process.
Since last year, the municipality of Isfahan, as one of the major metropolises in the centre of Iran, has been concentrating on spatially enabling society. In this regards, and due to a need of updating Isfahan’s maps and spatial data to facilitate the spatial enablement, the Isfahan municipality has considered and developed a new process for updating these datasets and map platform as the first step towards the spatially enabling society.
This paper aims to present the methodology for updating the Isfahan map and datasets in scale of 1:2000. These datasets are subject to changes in different frequencies therefore there is a need to a dynamic and a synthetic method for incremental updating. It has been explored that the changes in datasets can be classified in the following areas:
The categories of change data
• Change in attributes, such as land use and parcels information and layers
• Change in shapes of parcels such as new buildings, roads, etc
.The frequency of changes
• Very high particularly in roads and traffic changes and new addresses
• High frequencies such as weekly on land use changes by administrative commissions
• Average frequencies such as monthly reported changes on new building constructions
• Low frequencies such as annual required updating for non-authorized buildings
• Non regular required updating after exploiting the large civil projects such as construction of a highway
The size and scales of the changes (for 1:2000 urban map used in Esfahan municipality)
• Large scale changes with more than 1 meter changes
• Average scale changes with 0.4 to 1 meter changes
• Small scale changes with 0.1 to 0.4 mete changes
• Very small scale changes with less than 0.1 meter changes
Based on these changes, the paper proposes two possible methods and also a synthetic approach for more efficient urban map updating. The first method is to use the information provided by the divisions within the municipality which are involved in the process of applying changes or authorizing changes. And the second one is to use independent sources of information such as high resolution satellite images integrated with aerial and terrestrial surveying.
The experiments showed that each of these approaches is useful only for some parts of the changes categorized above and neither may be fully operational. Therefore in this paper a synthetic method is introduced in which a well-structured cycle between different departments based on a distributed Geo-database organize the process of gathering information about the changes they make to the maps and furthermore a well-defined process will be used to employ Quickbird images for detecting changes and reporting them to the terrestrial surveying or Photogrammetry group (based on the size of the changes) to update the changes

Developing and Managing an Operational Global Spatial Data Infrastructure: The Case of Global Map (12)
Fraser Taylor, Chair, International Steering Committee for Global Mapping (Canada)

This paper will describe the challenges faced during the development of one of the first fully operational global spatial data infrastructures – Global Map. It will also discuss the ongoing operational challenges of further developing Global Map. Global Map was first proposed in the early 1990’s as a response to Agenda 21. The development and operational challenges are both administrative and technical and both sets of challenges will be discussed in this presentation. The technical challenges, although substantial, are less challenging than the administrative ones, which is of particular relevance to those trying to develop other global spatial data infrastructures. Global Map is administered by the International Steering Committee for Global Mapping (ISCGM) on behalf of all of the national mapping organizations of the world. A particular technical challenge has been the development of appropriate standards and specifications for Global Map. A new set of specifications and standards has recently been approved (November 2009). In the development of technical standards it is obviously important to utilize the best technical solution possible but at the same time there is little point in setting standards that the member nations cannot meet. The solutions must therefore be pragmatic in this respect as Global Map data is created by each member state.
As of December 2009, 164 countries and 16 regions were participating in the Global Map project and data has been released for 71 nations and 4 regions. Plans for Phase III of Global Map have been approved at the presentation will discuss these.


Parallel Session 2.5 (Room 308)
Legal & Socioeconomic Committee Round Table

During May 2010, the L&SE Chair visited the SDI coordinators in eight EU Member States on a fact-finding mission for the Turkish NSDI Technical Committee. During those visits, one common sentiment was expressed by all – "technical issues are no longer a barrier to creating SDIs ... the necessary standards now exist thanks to OGC and ISO TC 211 to achieve data and metadata harmonisation and systems and services interoperability at national, regional and global scales." The main challenges remaining are non-technical –organisational, governance, legal issues, economic impacts (costs and ROI), data access and sharing policies, cost recovery for government sponsored GI, etc. If these are your concerns, then you need to be an active member of the GSDI Legal & Socioeconomic Committee. See our workplan. Encouraging dialogue and action in regard to varying legal, economic, public policy and societal approaches and exploring best practice experiences are our objectives. Come to the L&SE Round Table meeting to learn more about how you can benefit and share knowledge regarding these key SDI implementation issues, whether you are charged with developing policy, drafting and implementing legislation or finding sustainable SDI business models – L&SE is where you should be!


Parallel Session 3.1 (Theater)
SDI Experiences: National

Making Sense of Local Spatial Data Infrastructure in Volcanic Disaster Risk Management; A Case Study (46)
Tandang Yuliadi Dwi Putra, National Coordinating Agency for Survey and Mapping, Trias Aditya (Indonesia), Walter de Vries (The Netherlands)

The Sleman local government conducts a risk management program for the Merapi Volcano to minimize damages and casualties in case of an eruption. This program uses spatial data technologies to enhance decision making and enable coordination of the risk management activities. The current situation is that spatial data are sporadically available, and data integration, sharing and effective use by decision makers within Sleman government agencies is not optimal. This research aimed to design and test an application to support a Local Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) for risk management efforts, with a particular emphasis on evacuation planning in case of a Merapi Volcano disaster. One of the essential applications of this local SDI
was the design of a geoportal. The design of this portal followed a number of steps. The first step involved a review on the activities needed in managing risks of the Merapi Volcano, and the associated spatial data needed. The next step was to examine the processes, problems, and information flows in evacuation planning. These prerequisites were used as foundation for the development of the application. The initial version of the proposed Geocollaboration Portal was customized in order to facilitate decision makers to coordinate and share updates and information on top of the portal’s map when dealing with the evacuation process. This customization consisted of equipping the portal with usable map presentations and interaction tools to support the collaborative decisions in volcanic disaster management. The final step consisted of a user group assessment to evaluate the usability of the application. The evaluation of this assessment showed that the collaborative portal on top of a local SDI could improve the agencies’ coordination and decision-making processes in the context of disaster preparedness and mitigation. The result shows the potential use of geocollaboration portals in support of the development of spatially enabled societies.

European Union Funding for INSPIRE Directive Implementation Projects (71)
Roger Longhorn, Info-Dynamics Research Associates Ltd (UK)

Receiving more than 31 Million euro funding from the European Union (EU) eContent and eContentplus information market programmes (2001 to 2011), and an additional sum in excess of 18 Million euro funding from SDI-related projects funded in the research-oriented Framework RTD Programmes (FP6 and FP7), scores of organisations have been exploring implementation issues (standards, methodologies, policies, tools) relating to preparedness for, and implementation of, the INSPIRE Directive for an Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community, the pan-European SDI.
Many of these projects were underway before the Directive was published (25 April 2007) and most have developed implementation oriented products (data models and associated tools for implementation or compliance testing) or services (geoportals) before the official INSPIRE Implementing Rules (legally binding EC Regulations or Decisions) were published (still ongoing as of April 2010). This paper looks at the objectives, budgets and results for 20 projects from the above programmes which were funded primarily because of their intended impact on INSPIRE implementation and the impact of INSPIRE on the geoinformation market in Europe.
The paper also looks at project coordination issues when such a large number of projects support one overall strategic goal, but from many different tactical approaches, and with little formal inter-project coordination required by the funding body. Outputs from these projects include data models for the same data themes; geoweb service oriented tools and portals; standards and methodologies; and related quality control and conformance testing regimes. The deliverables (outputs), while all similar, are seldom fully congruent, as they were not created in a truly collaborative environment, leading to dissimilarities in the final outputs.
Scheduling or timing mismatches, between work to be completed and arrival of official standards or rules via the INSPIRE implementation regulations, have direct impact on outputs from INSPIRE implementation oriented projects completed and still underway. Typical issues that have a direct and potentially negative impact when multiple projects attack similar goals (relating to INSPIRE Directive implementation) without specific cross-project coordination include:
• data modelling and related work was required to be completed prior to publication of full and final data specifications for the data themes covered, i.e. the EC Regulation governing interoperability, and
• geoportal services were developed, again prior to publication of final INSPIRE Network Services implementing rules via the EC Regulations for such services.
The paper presents a matrix showing where project deliverables overlapped as well as built on one another, with or without over coordination steps being taken within the project work plans or INSPIRE implementing rules development teams. The effect of such overlaps on the value of the funding provided is analysed, as well as sustainability issues relating to the output of such projects.

Measuring the Advancement of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure in the Americas (2000-2008) (76)
Monica Duque, Centro de Levantamientos Integrados de Recursos Naturales por Sensores Remotos (Ecuador), Jean Parcher (USA)

The level of development of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) in countries within Central America, South America and the Caribbean varies widely. In 2000 the Global Spatial Data Infrastructure (GSDI) undertook a survey of national and region spatial data infrastructure (SDI) around the globe, which included 21 responses from the Americas. The results summarized the types of institutions currently leading the NSDI efforts, the existence of legislature to support a NSDI, and the geospatial data availability for each country. In 2008-2009 the Ecuadorian Center for Integrated Surveys of Natural Resources with Remote Sensing (CLIRSEN) conducted a NSDI survey for each country within the Americas as a sub task of the Global Map of the Americas project. The survey was jointly funded from grants awarded by GSDI and the Pan American Institute of Geography and History. The major objectives of the survey were to assess: the availability of geospatial information for each country, the level of development of SDI’s for each country, determine the capacity building and technical transfer assistance needed to engage in the Global Map project and collection of geospatial data for each country, and gather information on applied use of small-scale data for the Americas. Overall 18 countries responded to the survey. This paper will compare the reported findings between the 2000 and 2008-2009 surveys and apply these data to measure the advancement of the NSDI in the Americas during the first decade of the 21st Century.

Chinese Rural Land Registration: Applicable Geospatial Technologies as Field Tested in Anhui Province (62)
Christopher Barlow, International Land Systems Inc (USA)

The Chinese government is currently experimenting with methods to quickly yet accurately register rural households’ lands in China. This is in part to encourage more equitable wealth distribution in China, and also at a microeconomic level to protect agricultural lands from rapid industrial, retail, and residential land development. Food security is a central policy directive of the Chinese Central Planning Commission. International Land Systems Inc. (ILS) has work with the Anhui provincial government for the past three years testing geospatial solutions that are effective in helping county governments’ register agricultural household lands. Partnering with ESRI and Trimble Navigation, we have been tasked with addressing three important issues pertaining to rural land registration:
1. How to bring about greater workflow efficiency within local government to register local lands?
2. What methods are available to rapidly map household parcels? On average in Anhui province each household maintains and cultivates 10 parcels of disconnected land.
3. How does topography influence cost as distributed across a provincial-level land registry information management system?
Anhui province and the central Chinese government are tackling an important issue pertaining to rural land tenure – an issue that affects the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Geospatial technologies offer in part a method, but what are the costs, and also what are the benefits to a digital land records infrastructure? ILS aims to answer this through a presentation of a unique cost-benefit analysis.


Parallel Session 3.2 (Room 303)
Spatial Enablement: Opportunities

Spatially Enabled Societies: Asia and the Pacific (902)
Abbas Rajabifard, Ian Williamson (Australia)

The Asia and Pacific region is the largest region in the world with a vast area of land and water containing some 60 per cent of the world’s population, and including 56 countries according to the United Nations. The countries span a wide part of the globe from Iran and Armenia in the West to French Polynesia in the East, from the Russian Federation and Japan in the North to New Zealand in the South.
This region is one of the first regions in the world that started to develop a Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) at its regional level. It has a complex social and political environment, typified by competing and often conflicting priorities and motivations. Every case in this region is unique because of its national context, language and characteristics (such as size, population, political systems, social and economic priorities, and varied infrastructures and skills), the national traditional and cultural attitudes, and the people who participate, develop and use SDIs.
With this development and strategy, spatially enable government and society is now part of Asia Pacific plans and intentions. These trends are coupled with institutional and structural reforms in the use of Spatial Information (SI) and SDI as an enabling platform. While SEG increasingly operates in a virtual world, we still have a long way to go.
This chapter presents and summarizes the outcomes of two major events which have been conducted in the Asia Pacific region regarding spatially enablement and, also the activities of a working group on SEG through WG3 of the PCGIAP. Finally, the chapter outlines the opportunities, issues and challenges involved in the design and development of a SEG.

Spatially Enabled Government in Europe as an basic ingredient for Spatially Enabled Societies (903)
Bas Kok (Netherlands), Joep Crompvoets (Belgium)

In the definition of Spatial Enabled Society (Wallace, 2007), Spatial Enabled Society is “a scenario for the future as we are in an increasingly complex and rapidly changing world, societies can be regarded as spatial enabled where location and information are regarded as common goods made available to citizens and businesses to encourage creativity and product development.” The authors in this article explain that the vast majority of the public are users of spatial information. One of the statements in this article is to make existing spatial data infrastructures (SDI’s) more appropriate for spatially enabling government and society. Four strategic challenges are formulated as an important milestone for the successful realization of SDI implementation towards spatial enabling societies and governments. These strategic challenges can be summarized as follows: SDI governance for broad stakeholder involvement, promotion of data sharing, creation of enabling platforms and capacity building. This chapter illustrates with examples that SDI governance and the use of spatially enabled platforms are fundamental conditions for successful partnership building in national EU Member States e-government programs.

OneMap: A Multi-Agency Window to Public Sector Information (920)
Lim Ming Khai, Singapore Land Authoity (Singapore)

SLA is responsible for driving the NSDI which is named the Singapore Geospatial Collaborative Environment (SG-SPACE). The objective is to create a holistic institutional framework of policies, standards, capacity etc to enable greater sharing and usage of spatial data managed by government agencies on a whole-of-government approach. One of the key tasks is to promote and proliferate the sharing and use of geospatial data to support better decision making and the creation of new business opportunities. OneMap, which is the first key deliverable of the SG-SPACE, is a common map platform for government agencies to publish geospatial information and deliver map-based e-services to the public. A unique aspect of OneMap is the inclusion of non-government partners and the provision of Application Programming Interface (API) to allow the community and private enterprise to use OneMap as a service to mash-up and create value-added applications that benefit the general public.

Comparing and Assessing the Republic of Macedonia SDI Development (2005/2010) - Solid Base for its Strategy Development (28)
Dimo Todorovski, Agency for real estate cadastre (Macedonia), Joep Crompvoets (Belgium)

When approaching development of a National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) strategy for specific country (among other required activities) appropriate analyses of the current status are necessary to be performed and they should include: identification of key stakeholders, core datasets, legal framework and NSDI organization.
This paper presents the stakeholder analyses of NSDI status in the Republic of Macedonia performed in 2005 and the repetition of same analyses in 2010. Initially key stakeholders are identified and grouped as primary and secondary. Second classification is whether the key stakeholders are: Suppliers/Producers, Regular Consumers/Users, Occasional Consumers/Users and Non-Consumers/Beneficiaries. Evaluating the key stakeholders by interest and power is also performed. Next an identification of core datasets that stakeholders provide is made. All these analyses are made in order to have basic overview of the key stakeholders status and their datasets, and the results from these analyses are a solid base for the NSDI strategy development in the case of Republic of Macedonia.
In parallel to the previous analyses, two additional assessments of the NSDI in the Republic of Macedonia are performed. The results of these assessments provide an indication about the current status and use of Macedonian NSDI and all its aspects – technological and non-technological. In order to have a more comprehensive assessment, two different assessment approaches are applied: SDI-Readiness (Delgado et al., 2005) and INSPIRE State-of-Play (Vandenbroucke et al., 2008). Each approach treats the assessment of NSDIs from a different view and context and so with a different purpose in mind.
At the end conclusions are derived from the comparison of the results of the stakeholders analyses and the results of the two additional NSDI-assessment. Additionally this paper concludes that all necessary initial analyses are performed and they form a good starting point and input for the development of the strategy for Macedonian NSDI.


Parallel Session 3.3 (Room 304)
SDI Assessment and Implementation Practices

Towards an Assessment Framework for Spatially Enabled Government (81)
Peter Holland, Centre for SDIs and Land Administration, University of Melbourne, Abbas Rajabifard, Ian Williamson (Australia)

Government today confronts challenging and complex issues – the global financial crisis, terrorism, climate change, an aging population, deteriorating public infrastructure, natural resource depletion, and increasing demands for welfare support. Many of these issues require coordinated action across governments. In nearly every case government responses require knowledge of location – where are the people, infrastructure and resources affected by these issues and where should the response be targeted. Although government has benefited from the use of spatial technology for many years, this use has been for the most part fragmented and uncoordinated. Relatively recent developments in the fields of ICT, the internet and spatial data infrastructure (SDI), now offer the real prospect of cost-effective deployment of knowledge of location in business systems across the whole of government. This is called the spatial enablement of government (SEG), part of a broader and all encompassing phenomenon, the spatial enablement of society. One of the key requirements of SEG is a means of assessing whether investments in enablement are achieving expected outcomes. This chapter briefly reviews the state of global development on SEG and cases of SEG in Australia, North America and Europe; and then focuses on an assessment framework for SEG. The framework builds on assessment methods under development or in place for eGovernment, SDI and, public policy and program evaluation. The chapter concludes with some views on future directions for research on SEG assessment frameworks.

SPATIALIST: Spatial Data Infrastructures and Public Sector Innovation in Flanders (Belgium) (131)
Joep Cropmpvoets, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Glenn Vancauwenberge, Danny Vandenbroucke, Katleen Janssen, Ezra Dessers (Belgium)

This paper presents the first results of the interdisciplinary project SPATIALIST: Spatial Data Infrastructures and public sector innovation in Flanders (Belgium). This four-year research project is funded by Institute for the Promotion of Innovation by Science and Technology in Flanders and started in September 2007. Unique of this research project is that it aims to identify and analyse key elements affecting the spatial data infrastructure in Flanders from multi-disciplinary perspectives. In this way, organisational, public management, legal, economic and technological elements are taken into account. This multi-disciplinary approach provide insights into the proportion between the elements that somehow contribute to the development of spatially enabled governments
Starting point of the research project was the consideration of the concept of spatial data infrastructures as a network emphasizing the dynamic and heterogeneous interactions among numerous stakeholders. In this way, spatial data infrastructures are operationalised in terms of organisations that are producing and using spatial data in a shared environment, and flows of spatial data between these organisations.
This research project is strongly based on empirical studies. The empirical data are collected by surveys and case studies. Regarding the surveys, an online questionnaire was sent to 508 public organisations at different administrative levels. In this way, it was possible to identify and characterise the key spatial data flows among public organisations in Flanders. Regarding the case studies, four cases were selected: (1) spatial zoning planning, (2) flood planning, (3) address management and (4) traffic accidents registration. In the context of SPATIALIST, a case is defined as a business process between and within government organisations in Flanders, in which spatial data is accessed, used and exchanged. About 6 organisations were selected as embedded case within each case. The selection of the (embedded) cases was based on expected variations regarding the disciplinary key elements. The case study data were mainly collected by multiple in-depth interviews in each embedded case.
Besides the various disciplinary analyses, different disciplinary approaches are combined in interdisciplinary analyses. The examination of different combinations of causally relevant elements, should lead to the identification of distinct “recipes” for developing spatially enabled business processes.
Finally, the paper presents the research approach and the first results relevant for the development of spatially enabled governments and societies in more detail.

Licensing Models: An Unavoidable Nuisance or a Necessary Component? Implementing INSPIRE through the ESDIN Project (912)
Laila Aslesen, Norwegian Mapping and Cadastre Authority (Norway)

ESDIN is a Best Practice Network for Spatial Data Infrastructures in Europe and is supported by the eContent+ programme. ESDIN is the bridge between the theory and the practice – the practical implementation of the INSPIRE Directive. ESDIN requires a number of harmonization efforts on many levels; integration of services, a unified data specification, and also harmonization of access methods, licensing and pricing. The overall aim is to maximise use of the reference data from European National Mapping and Cadastre Authorities (NMCA), for public and private users alike. Past experience has proven it is difficult to harmonise the NMCAs licensing policy. Each NMCA has evolved within its own unique national context, and to various degrees, each exists in a different cultural, political, social and economic framework, often bound by decisions outside their influence as to what they can and cannot do.
To address this, an ambitious and radical approach has been taken to develop an overall set of guidelines applicable to all European NMCA’s. In doing so, attention has been given to the user’s needs, the developing technology, new markets and usages, and how other providers of digital content outside the geodata industry have dealt with the issues, such as open source licenses, Creative Commons, etc. The result is a flexible set of building blocks adaptable for a whole range of licensing needs, while at the same time providing a harmonized approach for the users.

Leveraging on GIS for Public Housing in Singapore (911)
Loh Suat Yen, Housing Board Development (HDB), Lim Loy Chin, Elizabeth How (Singapore)

As an internationally acclaimed provider of public housing, Housing & Development Board, Singapore (HDB) strives to be an outstanding organisation with people committed to fulfilling aspirations for homes and communities all are proud of. This paper shares the role of Geographic Information System (GIS) in meeting the challenges of HDB's diverse functions. From land planning, land development, infrastructure management, estate administration to public e-services, the role of GIS in HDB is evolving rapidly to reap the benefits of an enterprise Geographical Information System.


Parallel Session 3.4 (Room 305)
Metadata Issues

Supporting Semantics-Based Metadata Discovery with MetaSys (33)
Kean Huat Soon, National University of Singapore, Douglas Miller, Brian Bills, Jennifer Williams (USA)

Existing metadata discovery tools that rely on exact string matching as the only search option have proven insufficient to search for relevant metadata. Since different, yet semantically related terms can be used to describe and to search for the same dataset, a metadata tool that deals with semantics is essential.
In this presentation, we will demonstrate a semantics-based metadata discovery tool called MetaSys. MetaSys was developed to support the Critical Zone Exploration Network (CZEN) community (www.czen.org) for creating, updating, and more importantly searching geographic metadata semantically. Within the MetaSys framework, all metadata is stored in the metadata database (with PostgreSQL) using the metadata population function. The stored metadata can then be updated using the metadata update function.
MetaSys supports users to search the metadata by utilizing the CZEN ontology, a knowledge structure that describes concepts that are related to Critical Zone, the earth zone which includes land near surface (above and under), vegetations, water bodies, etc. The CZEN ontology mainly consists of two important relationships: “subClassOf” and “seeAlso”. “SubClassOf” relation is used to relate concepts that are related with the generalization relationship, for example “humidity” is subClassOf “atmosphere”. “SeeAlso” relation is considered here to connect concepts that are related according to the domain expert perspectives, for example “evapotranspiration” and “humidity” can be related with “seeAlso”. As MetaSys treats concepts that are related with “seeAlso” as more important than concepts that are related with “subClassOf”, for instance if the search term is “humidity”, metadata that describes “evapotranspiration” dataset will be ranked higher in the result than metadata that describes “atmosphere” dataset.
MetaSys not only allows the users to search for metadata semantically, but it also supports result ranking using the CZEN ontology. In order for MetaSys to function to its fullest potential, an adequate amount of metadata must be complete. The metadata currently stored in the database is far from complete; additional efforts are needed from all parties involved to contribute their metadata.

Automatic Spatial Metadata Enrichment: Reducing Metadata Creation Burden through Spatial Folksonomies (23)
Mohsen Kalantari, Hamed Olfat, Abbas Rajabifard (Australia)

Metadata plays a key role in facilitating access to up-to-date spatial information and contributes to the finding and delivering of high quality spatial information services to users. In particular, metadata is an important element in functioning and facilitating spatial enabling societies in Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) initiatives. With huge amount of spatial information being generated, a spatial application must be sufficiently flexible to extract and update spatial metadata automatically.
Automatic spatial metadata generation framework includes three fundamental but complementary streams; automatic creation, automatic update and automatic enrichment of spatial metadata. This chapter explores the automatic metadata enrichment stream based on the tagging and folksonomy concepts. The chapter argues how folksonomies help bringing the vocabulary of spatial data users into play and using them hand in hand with those sometimes mysterious terms supplied by experts in metadata records.
The chapter then builds on the tagging and folksonomy concepts and proposes a conceptual model to employ them for spatial metadata enrichment. The chapter finally discusses advantages and disadvantages of this approach against formal type of organizing spatial metadata.

Exploring the Key Areas of Spatial Metadata Automation Research in Australia (72)
Hamed Olfat, University of Melbourne, Mohsen Kalantari, Abbas Rajabifard, Ian Williamson, Christopher Pettit (Australia)

Improving the spatial metadata management process to facilitate data discovery, access and retrieval through an SDI platform has been the goal of a number of organizations at different jurisdictional levels in Australia. A current linkage research project titled “Spatial Metadata Automation” is being conducted at the University of Melbourne in conjunction with some industry partners. This research project aims to explore different approaches for automating spatial metadata so that the process of creating and updating spatial metadata – where feasible – becomes automatic.
As part of the project an online questionnaire was designed and distributed within the major organizations dealing with spatial data in Australia to assess the users’ needs regarding metadata automation and also the current status of the activities in metadata creation and updating.
This paper presents the results of the assessment process and explores the key areas of spatial metadata automation research in Australia. It also reviews some of the more important initiatives regarding spatial metadata in this country and explains the characteristics and framework of the current research. The paper then discusses the structure of the questionnaire and the results of the responses analysis. Finally, the findings, future needs and research questions are presented.

Building and Maintaining Metadata Repositories with the Aid of Ontology Tools and Technologies (143)
Tomasz Kubik, Wroclaw University of Technology, Adam Iwaniak (Poland)

Building cross-country infrastructure for spatial information in Europe is a great challenge. It requires number of organizational efforts, including legislative work, acquiring source of funding, standardization and practical implementation. Most of these tasks are technology independent, apart from the last two. Standardization, in general, concentrates on modeling at the abstract level, but when stepping down into implementation level, it provides more clues on technology used.
All organizational and political movements in the European geospatial domain started with preparation of the INSPIRE Directive which was accepted into legislation on the 15th May 2007. As a Framework Directive this document does not give any specific technological details. Detailed regulations are to be defined in Implementing Rules – normative documents, seconded by informative INSPIRE Guidance Documents – documents, which are not legally binding but specify detailed technical aspects of implementation.
To accomplish the task of creation of detailed specifications the SDICs and LMOs proposed and Commission selected the group of experts, organized in the Drafting Teams (DTs). Great part of the experts work was derived from OGC specification and ISO 19XXX series standards. This caused introduction of SOA based solutions that use SOAP and KVP binding and XML with XML Schema based encoding. But accepting only these proposition can ends with benefits and losses as well.
The development of “de jure” standards (which INPIRE specifications belongs to) is a long process. It does not always follow up the emergence of new technologies. Much better in the rate of IT changes keeping are “de facto” standards – specification created and accepted by international communities closely related to the technology and market. This is especially visible in the field of Internet applications.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, already described the future of the Internet together with means for unlocking the greater power of the Web in his vision of Linked Data. The term Linked Data is about “using the Web to connect related data that was not previously linked, or using the Web to lower the barriers to linking data currently linked using other methods” [http://linkeddata.org/]. It is also used “to describe a recommended best practice for exposing, sharing, and connecting pieces of data, information, and knowledge on the Semantic Web using URIs and RDF." [Wikipedia].
The motivation of the work presented in the paper was an observed chance of transferring recent achievements of the Semantic Web into geospatial domain and vice versa. The subject of the analysis obeys building bridges between INSPIRE metadata infrastructure and distributed semantic resources. Thus the paper includes some views on building and maintaining metadata repositories with the aid of ontology tools and technologies as RDF, OWL and SPARQL. It shows up the potential links between existing solutions and solutions that emerge in the Semantic Web. It provides also some references to the ISO 19150 standard proposition and remarks on ISO 19115/19139 based ontologies. It touches the problem of thesauri implementation and use in the scope of INSPIRE.


Parallel Session 3.5 (Room 306)
Local to Global Spatial Enablement: JBGIS Perspectives

The International Cartographic Association and Capacity Building
William Cartwright, President, International Cartographic Association (ICA) (Australia)

The activities of the ICA are important for promoting and advancing the theory and praxis of cartography.  Throughout its 50-year history, ICA has brought together researchers, government mapping agencies, commercial cartographic publishers, software developers, educators, earth and environmental scientists, and those with a passion for maps. An important part of ICA activities is that of outreach.  It addresses these and other issues through direct ICA initiatives through its Executive and member organisations and with partners from ICA affiliates, sister societies and industry. The activities of Commissions and Working Groups and programmes provide the ‘powerhouse’ that supports these endeavours. This paper begins by providing an overview of the ICA and its structure and Strategic Plan.  Then it outlines ICA initiatives in the areas of education, professional practice and society.

IMTA Perspectives on Spatial Enablement
Mark Cygan, International Map Trade Association (IMTA)

forthcoming

Remote Sensing: From Images to Information - A Global Vision
Anthony Milne, Immediate Past President, IEEE - Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (GRSS)

The IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (GRS-S) is a leading society in remote sensing technology and applications for the scientific use of earth observation data. Among its technical disciplines, active and passive microwave represents one core field of research along with optical and hyperspectral imaging.  In addition, GRS-S fields of competence encompass the entire end-to-end system chain in remote sensing. This includes sensor technology, hardware architecture, data archiving, distribution and fusion, algorithms for data processing and evaluation, parameter inversion and modeling, as well as user applications.
Through its publications, annual IGARSS conference, specialty symposia and technical committees, GRS-S is recognized as a premier society in the field of spatial information where new technologies, techniques and applications are born, networking scientists from all parts of the world. Through its Graduates of the Last Decade (GOLD) program it seeks provide young scientists with support in developing their emerging careers in remote sensing related engineering, science and applications.
By means of   six  technical committees; special sessions at regional and international conferences; technical and financial co-sponsorship of specialty symposia; special topic issues in its three journals (TGRS,GRS-L, J-STARS) and its participation in global initiatives such as GEOSS and JBGIS, the Society provides services and opportunities for the training, implementation and adoption of spatial information into regional, national and local frameworks that can assist in  decision making processes related to environmental sustainability and economic development. GRS-S through its recently established Globalisation Task Force is committed to persuing policies that will help extend its scientific, technical and professional services more effectively into third world and developing countries in order to contribute to societal benefits through the use of spatial information.

ISCGM Perspectives on Spatial Enablement
Fraser Taylor, Chair, International Steering Committee for Global Map (ISCGM)

This paper will consider the contributions of Global Map to improved decision making on environmental and sustainable development issues at the global scale. It will also consider the use of Global Map in environmental education and in the mitigation of natural disasters.

FIG Perspectives on Spatial Enablement
Stig Enemark, President, International Federation of Surveyors (FIG) and Aalborg University (Denmark)

Spatially enabled government is achieved when governments use place as the key means of organising their activities in addition to information, and when location and spatial information are available to citizens and businesses to encourage creativity. The FIG approach to spatial enablement is that - in order to meet the challenges of the new millennium - land administration, cadastre and land registration functions should be integrated with topographic mapping programs within the context of a wider national strategy for spatial data infrastructure (SDI). The wider impact of this approach will be presented and discussed.

GSDI Perspectives on Spatial Enablement
David Coleman, President-Elect, GSDI Association (GSDI)

Geospatially-enabled services present new opportunities to pinpoint and document the location of people and things, to be able to track where they have been, and to be able to predict where they will be at a given time. This offers individuals and organizations alike a rich collection of opportunities and causes for concern:
* New de facto standards have emerged;
* Well-established national organizations have been slow off the mark in taking better advantage of their user communities customers;
* In a few cases, questionable new location-based services are being established before legal or ethical questions are raised, with the media and the regulatory agencies playing catch-up after the fact.
What are the new realities and what new relationships are necessary for organizations in this emerging global spatial data infrastructure? Are our organizations equipped with the right mandate and mix of people and skills to be relevant and effective? Who needs to care?
This presentation will offer more questions than answers: raising issues to be discussed and debated by panelists and members of the audience.


Lightning Presentations: Wednesday Afternoon

Ubiquitous Personal Location Tracking: Protecting Both Privacy and Free Speech
Harlan Onsrud (United States)

A laudable goal of ubiquitous computing and location tracking is to enhance our day-to-day living by invisibly embedding sensors and computing platforms in our stationary and mobile surroundings. Sensors being developed and deployed within distributed computing networks include those able to locate (both outside and inside), see (ranging from automated detection of light to identification of specific individuals and objects), hear (detection of specific sounds to transcribing language), smell (detection of specific gases), feel (detection of specific motions, temperature, humidity, etc) and communicate. Sensors in and on our bodies will communicate through our phones, cars, offices, homes, transportation infrastructure, and with objects along our travel paths. This presentation describes one illustrative pervasive tracking environment in our feasible future, describes a combined technological and legal approach for granting individuals control over their information exposure, and then assesses the proposed solution in terms of supporting both freedom of speech and personal information privacy.

Integration of GIS and remote sensing technology and local perception on environmental protection planning (25)
Ty Pham Huu, Chuong Huynh Van (Vietnam)

This study investigates the integration of GIS and remote sensing technology and local perception on environmental protection planning in which soil erosion and landslide in the mountainous areas are the special environmental issues. GIS and Remote Sensing is one of ICT sources can be used to help identify the risk level and actual soil erosion and landslide severity rates in large scale areas and therefore it is to support decision makers to make an informed-environmental planning related to soil erosion and landslide. Incoperating the AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) method with local knowledge provides a model to determine the suitable location for planting Lo O trees and community-based post-planning management practices via village groups. Lo O tree plantation is one of different solutions and options for reducing upland soil erosion and landslide through community consultation meetings that is in line with district planting plan and prefered by local people because it is high economic value, easy to plant on various soil types, and effective protection capacity from erosion

Soil erosion assessment using GIS and USLE in Ethiopia (89)
Anissa Gara, Tokyo University of Agriculture, Shinji Suzuki, Fumio Watanabe, Sawahiko Shimada, Hiromichi Toyoda (Japan)

Water erosion and nutrient depletion, drought and famine have frequently occurred in Ethiopia. Landscape degradation by soil erosion has increased considerably in Ethiopian lands due to deforestation of natural mountain forests and the cultivation of large areas resulting in a serious environmental problem threatening the sustainability of agriculture and population food security. The most vulnerable soils are those without a protection plant cover. That’s why, in order to evaluate and predict erosion issues, it is necessary to define the correspondence between topographic characteristics and land cover that could explain the land cover distribution through the watersheds in all Ethiopia for this we used ArcGIS 9.2 to found out the correlation between topographic characteristics and vegetation cover. Furthermore we extended our research to find out spatial information on soil erosion risk at East Shewa Zone, Oromia Region in Ethiopia using the integration of USLE and ArcView 3.3. The erosion analysis showed that most of the lands in East Shewa zone (74%) are under high, very high, severe or very severe erosion and are covered mainly by cultivation, shrublands and grasslands. These lands are located mostly in the north-east, center and south-west of East Shewa area. This is the evidence for erosive areas repeatedly cultivated or frequently suggested to grazing such as shrublands and grasslands as it is the case of most areas in East Shewa and particularly the visited farmlands at Dalecha Gada village in Boset Wareda located at the north part of East Shewa. To inspect the impact of conservation activities on soil resource we calculated empirically erosion rate at two groups of farmlands i.e. farmlands with soil and water conservation structures and farmlands without. We found out that conservation techniques had a positive environmental effect since lands owned by farmers who adopted this strategy had lower amount of erosion that in lands of farmers who did not opt for it.

Land Titling and Recertification as Tools for State Spatial Data Infrastructure Development in Nigeria (100)
Anthony Adeoye (Nigeria)

Land Titling and Recertification are powerful tools being used to strengthen the business of land allocation and registration through the Land Reform programmes of the 7 points Agenda of the Federal Government of Nigeria in order to meet the expectation of the modern ways of land management devoid of any fraudulent practices. The land titling and recertification programmes offer Electronic processing and storage of all state land records into digital database. These have been identified by many states in Nigeria as fundamental applications for States Geographical Information Service (GIS) upon which the State Spatial Data Infrastructure can be developed. The objectives of the Land Titling and recertification of the State are to serve as planning, response, security and revenue generation tools through the creation of a sustainable land administration approach and strategy. The Land titling and recertification of the state is expected to create a database for land resources through an enterprise GIS which will make land resource services to be more proactive in the services rendered towards transforming the State’s responsibilities and services into a marketable product. The paper will examine the approach and strategy adopted by some of the States Lands Department in Nigeria towards the Land titling and recertification programme as initiatives for the establishment of enterprise GIS for the development of the State spatial data infrastructure.

Challenges Facing Information Communication Technology and Youth Development in Tororo Archdiocese (115)
Godwin Michael Wantsusi (Uganda)

Discussion of the advantages of Information Communication Technology at global level is often done as though it is a universally accessible service to all. Challenges at policy, infrastructural, educational and cultural levels are hardly discussed in regard to developing countries. An assessment of these challenges reveals that they contribute to the widespread poverty, constrain development of skills, reduce employment opportunities and adversely affect productivity especially among the youth in developing countries. The geographical area served by Tororo Archdiocese comprises 11 districts, 250 sub-county and 15 urban local governments. None of these local governments together with Tororo Archdiocese and other local development partners has adopted an Information Communication Technology policy, ordinance or bye-law. In short, they have decided to do nothing as local partners to contribute to the expansion of choices and opportunities for youth development using ICT. Global policies as in the Millennium Development Goal number 8, Global Spatial Data Infrastructure and Uganda National policy on ICT lack recognition and thus implementation at the local levels despite people’s felt needs. Accordingly, little has been done by local development partners to overcome infrastructural, educational and cultural challenges that face ICT in the development of capabilities to expand choices and opportunities for peoples’ well-being. Unemployment, underemployment, preventable natural disasters, low productivity and other ills face the youth due to unutilized ICT opportunities. Private sector partners as MTN, ZAIN, WARID, ORANGE and UTL have done their part. Adoption of local ICT policies at institutional level in local governments and civil society will enhance private sector efforts towards human development through ICT. Educational opportunities as in Universal Primary Education, Universal Secondary Education and Functional Adult Literacy could be utilized to advance human well being through ICT. Special training programmes could be planned by local governments and non-government partners to boost use of ICT if local policies were in place to guide the process. A move away from irrelevant educational curriculum could start with demands from communities as ICT skills training are gradually integrated in the seven year primary and six year secondary education cycles. Other educational programmes as FAL and BTVET can be made core entries for ICT training. The infrastructure of housing in primary and secondary schools in the rural areas of Uganda can be good in implementing ICT. Challenges of power and inadequate personal computer distributions can overcome through local ordinances and bye-laws. The current lay down of the optic fibre cable can thus become meaningful to human development with ICT.

The Spatial Analysis On Groundwater Quality Based On Chemical And Biological Parameters (129)
Tri Widowati, Gadjah Mada University, Retno Prasetia, Yosep Prayoga (Indonesia)

Parangkusuma sub-village, Parangtritis village, Kretek sub-district, Bantul district is a South Java Coastal area that is recently actively developing as tourism area and simple residential area. Rocks in the research site are composed from sand materials with highly fast permeability, while the development of wells and sewages (latrines) in the research site are considered as less fulfilling the standard. Population in the research exploits groundwater as the drinking water source. This research aimed to (a) identify groundwater flow direction; (b) identify the quality of groundwater; and (c) map the level of groundwater pollution based on Ammonia, Nitrate, Nitrite and E.Colli contents in Parangkusuma sub-village, Parangtritis village, Kretek sub-district, Bantul district, Yogyakarta Special province. Data gathered in this research involved sampling data. The ground water flow direction, the depth of water table and groundwater samples were decided through the use of systematic sampling. The Ammonia, Nitrate, Nitrite, and E. Colli contents in the groundwater samples were measured by using laboratory test. Quantitative, descriptive, and spatial analysis methods were adopted in this research. Research results showed that groundwater flow direction was from the North to the South and South-East. This was affected by topographical factors on the North of the research site. The depth of water table ranged between 1 – 5 meters; hence, it was classified into shallow water table (< 7 meters). Some wells and latrines were in parallel position with groundwater flow direction; therefore, the pollution caused by latrine effluent-produced substances into groundwater was found in some wells. The content of Nitrate ranged between 2.1 – 32.8 mg/L. Nitrate pollution in groundwater (Nitrate content > 10 mg/L) was mostly found in the western and south-eastern area of research site associated with residential land use. The content of Nitrite ranged between 0 – 0.004 mg/L, while the content of Ammonia was 0 mg/L (the Nitrite threshold of drinking water and Ammonia were 1 mg/L, 0 mg/L, respectively); hence, the ground water in the research site was not polluted by Nitrite and Ammonia. The content of E. Colli in the research site ranged between 7 - > 2400 MPN. The E. Colli pollution in groundwater (the content of E. Colli > 1000 MPN) was mostly detected in the western area of research site associated with residential land use.

Mapping the Urban Thermal Environment in Singapore using a GIS Framework (130)
Reuben Mingguang Li, Institute of High Performance Computing, Agency for Science, Technology and Research and National University of Singapore, Matthias Roth (Singapore)

In urban climate studies, the parallel use of spatial data (e.g. land use maps, building plans) alongside non-spatial data (e.g. station measurements, site parameters) is almost unavoidable. As such, studies in this field often require the use of spatial databases and GIS platforms to achieve optimal efficiency and capability. Furthermore, geospatial techniques are often necessary to spatially interpolate point measurements.
The present exploratory study uses a GIS framework to (1) derive statistical relationships of the urban heat island (UHI) with land-use and urban geometry based on more than 30 stations measuring temperature located throughout Singapore, (2) derive empirical relationships to produce an UHI map covering the entire mainland Singapore region, and (3) systematically study the spatial variation of the near-surface (canopy-layer) UHI in Singapore. The ESRI geodatabase was employed as a central database management tool while the ArcGIS platform supplied the tools to readily perform spatial analysis. Experimentally, the Google Maps API (with Google Street View functionality) and Google Visualizations API were used in conjunction to create a lightweight, web-based Urban Climate Map Interface (UCMI).
Based on regression analysis of individual independent variables against mean daily maximum UHI intensity (nocturnal only), percent vegetation and built-up cover within 100m and 500 m radii (V100, V500, B100, B500) showed strong predictive capabilities. Urban canyon height-to-width ratio also emerged as an independent variable with considerable predictive capability. A stepwise multiple regression model was subsequently run and a two-variable model developed (using % built-up and H/W ratio as the predictors, significant for a given confidence level) to predict the mean UHI intensity. Shapefiles for both independent variables were rasterized to a grid cell resolution of 500m and a UHI intensity map predicting the nocturnal mean maximum UHI typical of the warm season was produced. This was achieved by applying the model to each layer of grid cells island-wide using raster operations in ArcMap. This example shows that most areas in Singapore experience mean daily maximum UHI values in excess of 4ºC during the warm monsoon season. The coolest locations are associated with the forest areas in the central catchment reserve, the less developed areas in the northwest and a smaller patch in the east where an airfield and heavily vegetated military grounds are located. This method accounts for the discrete nature of canopy-layer thermal environment as opposed to traditional spatial interpolation techniques such as kriging.
One of the desired outcomes relating to spatial data infrastructure achieved in this study was the creation of an urban climate portal (UCMI). Although it is in an experimental stage, it encompasses spatial functionality that can provide valuable microclimatic information for stakeholders, authorities and researchers alike.

Developing an agent based simulation model for earthquakes in the context of SDI (132)
Mahdi Hashemi, K.N. Toosi University of Technology, Ali Asghar Alesheikh (Iran)

Natural disasters such as Earthquakes are devastating hazards that affect the environment, and lead to financial, environmental and/or human losses. The resulting loss depends on the capacity of the population to support or resist the disaster, and their resilience. Simulation of earthquakes can greatly influence the quality of decisions in all steps of crisis management. Numerous technologies such as agents are developed for proper spatial simulation. Spatial agents are entities within an environment that can emulate mental processes or simulate rational behavior. This paper attempts to simulate the Earthquake by means of NetLogo software. In order to construct and assess the simulation, the information about Bam earthquake is used. The methodology used consists of three major steps. In the first step, all spatial information including satellite images (before and after the earthquake) and topographic/cadastral maps of the area were mosaicked and georeferenced. The parts of the city that contain various levels of destructions are selected. Three types of features namely buildings, roads and recreational areas were classified and extracted from the satellite images. In the second step, the governing factors of destructions were identified; a mathematical model that integrates the factors was constructed, and the resistance values for each pixel were computed. The classes were imported into raster space of NetLogo software and the resistance values were assigned to corresponding features. In the final step, the simulation was constructed for various parameter values (different earthquake strength, time elapses, etc.). The results were then presented to users. It is suggested that the software be used by various crisis management organization to have an in depth understanding of the destructions and the decisions to be made in various phases of crisis management.

Social Networks as a Means of Spreading SDI to Society
Mabel Alvarez (Argentina) and Lara López (Spain)

"Spatially enabled society" is an evolving concept which emerged a few years ago and is closely related to Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI). A society can be catalogued as spatially enabled when location and spatial information are common goods, available to citizens. Spatial enablement will support developed and developing countries to pursue sustainable development objectives. The distribution of information regarding SDI is still mainly oriented to persons who have certain knowledge. Technical language and the closed circuit of media used for distribution are probably the reasons why SDI cannot be understood easily by part of society. Nowadays, there are many people that are not familiar with SDI. However, many of them are probably assiduous users of social networks, mainly with a leisure purpose. From this point of view, exploring the most popular social networks and other media that could be used to spread SDI, the main conclusions obtained are:
- There are many uses for the most popular social networks, including trade, business and other purposes, but only a few of them are related to SDI.
- The fast growth of the social networks, seem to be a very promissory way for spreading SDI.  
In this context it will be necessary to consider the content and materials to share on social networks. They should be carefully developed in order that they can be easily understood by people without any specific knowledge in relation to SDI. It is a challenge for the near future to capitalise the demands of the spatial enabled society with the promissory possibilities given by the popular social networks and the specialised ones, such as the Geographic Information Knowledge Network, in order to to spread SDI knowledge.

GeoNode
Sebastian Benthall, Open Geo (US)

Much of the theory of Spatial Data Infrastructure was developed before the era of the modern Web 2.0.  What happens if you start from the best practices of the web and build an SDI implementation around them?  GeoNode is an open source software project that attempts to provide the answer.

Utilizing the Analytical Hierarchy Process and GIS to Identify and Transfer Schools and Residential Areas Adjacent to High Voltage Power Transmission Lines in Tabriz-Iran (118)
MohamadReza Rajabi, K.N.TOOSI University of Technology, Ali Mansourian, kambiz borna, majid Hamrah (Iran)

Electric energy has brought a lot of advantages and benefits for the advancement of human societies and increasing human welfare. but there are some risks and problems along with this energy. One of the problems that can be mentioned is about the harmful effects of its strong electromagnetic fields on human health. One of the powerful magnetic fields that is resulted by electrical energy is from High voltage power transmission lines. Today many studies has been done about the EMF (Electro-Magnetic Fields) effects on human health. In many of these studies have been warned that living in neighborhood of these lines can be Very dangerous. This paper explores the capabilities of Geospatial Information System (GIS) analysis and Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP); as a spatial Multi Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA), to determine optimum and healthy sites for constructing new schools and Housing in an urban area in Iran. The governing factors affecting the sites are identified and classified. These areas must be chosen so that in addition to basic requirements, receive minimum effects from the EMFs. Therefore, by using of spatial analysis and site selection methods in GIS environment suitable areas for restoration of dangerous areas residents, were introduced.

Standards, Crisis, and the Lost Art of Cartography
Talbot J. Brooks, Delta State University (US)

forthcoming

The Potential of Balloon Photography for The Participatory Mapping (134)
Catur Aries Rokhmana, Gadjah Mada University (Indonesia)

Mapping for Indonesia's land area which has characteristics: 1.95 million km.sq area, landscape archipelagos (> 17.500 islands), limited budgets and human resources is a challenge for mapping technology and building NSDI. Choosing "on demand mapping" concept will be much faster to meet the needs of users. In fact, the personal users prefer the very high-resolution imagery products to see the territory that is generally not more than 1000 Ha. So, the challenge is to develop technologies that provide opportunities for participatory mapping on they own territory. This paper will illustrate three cases examples for the potential of balloon photography as the participatory mapping system. Those cases are the use for cadastre mapping; mapping mitigation landslide area; and mapping of sampling forest areas. This paper describes the system architecture, the field procedures, the processing, and some limitations-advantages also. The three experiences show that the products from the use of balloon photography done by the community has the potential to be post-processed with a close-range photogrammetry system in order to produce accurate and in accordance with the need of the community itself.

Design and Implementation of Integrated Management and Assessment (154)
Maisam Toosi, Mamaghan Islamic Azad University, Ahmad Savari, Fereidoon Owfi, Somayeh Ordo, Mojgan Rezaei, Yousef Rezaei (Iran)

Petroleum activities are one of the very important and economical industries for each country in the world. Also, petroleum complex is strategically and importance industry, consequently have a programmed or system for managing, monitoring and assessing of risks, pollutions and environmental impacts of this complex is an oeuvre and consequential. First phase of this research and study carried out during 2008 - 09 Petroleum for environmental pollutions of petrochemical activities in Southern Pars Site which located in Bushehr province – Persian Gulf coastal zone in south of Iran. To recognition of effects and environmental pollutions, we have to study and to investigate all of functionality, environmental standards, environmental details (weather, water, soil, fauna, flora …) and all related things. This Project divided to five sections: 1-Classifying environmental details, 2-Pollutions reorganization and Design Pollution distributions Algorithms, 3-Station definition and Data Gathering, 4-Analyzing and processing, 5-Conclusion. At first step, spatial data were studied with emphasis on environmental details and their affectivities, class and variety of data. So that must be to realize about pollutions, and their distributions, for example output channels same as residuum, fellers and moreover sampling and distribution of pollutions in weather, soil and water. According to deciding, some information about parameters of pollution, distribution of pollutions, sampling, allocating station and transacting, and position of stations, thus we must be design and implementing system to managing and deciding. Indeed all of data that we required to analyzing is “geo coded”, and we need a digital system to managing data (MIS) and analyzing and processing in various distains and various areas in water, soil and weather, as a result we choose GIS to managing, monitoring and offering decides to reduce risk and bad effects of environmental pollutions. In this research and study, GIS software and ArcGIS package were used for to developing and implementing as case as integrated management system. Also, data and information processed and analyzed .for develops and implements algorithms and methods in ArcGIS. Remotely online sensors with stable position in around were needed for to gathering data, enter and outside the complex that sent data and parameters to main station, also we selected some station chancy, and that these samples can be enter to system manually. At the end we have an integrated system consist of developed GIS software, Integrated database (spatial and attribute data), online sensors, standards of data gathering, processing, assessing and deciding to reduce of bad effective of pollutions.


Parallel Session 4.1 (Theater)
SDI for Cities (Joint FIG and GSDI Session)

Managing Megacities: A Spatial Solution (7)
Paul Kelly, Spatial Strategies Pty Ltd (Australia)

Urbanisation is a major change taking place globally. The urban global tipping point was reached in 2007 when for the first time in history over half of the world’s population was living in urban areas; around 3.3 billion people. It is estimated that a further 500 million people will be urbanised in the next five years and projections indicate that the percentage of the world’s population urbanised by 2030 will be 60%.
This rush to the cities, caused in part by the attraction of opportunities for wealth generation and economic development, has created the phenomenon of ’megacities’ that have a population of over 10 million. There are currently 19 megacities and there are expected to be around 27 by 2020. Over half of this growth will be in Asia. This incredibly rapid growth of megacities causes severe ecological, economical and social problems. It is increasingly difficult to manage this growth in a sustainable way. It is recognised that over 70% of the growth currently happens outside of the formal planning process and that 30% of urban populations in developing countries live in slums or informal settlements, where vacant state-owned or private land is occupied illegally and used for illegal slum housing.
Administrations in large cities are often confronted with a multitude of key problems, like high urban densities, transport, traffic congestion, energy inadequacy, unplanned development and lack of basic services, illegal construction both within the city and in the periphery, informal real estate markets, creation of slums, poor natural hazards management in overpopulated areas, crime, water, soil and air pollution leading to environmental degradation, climate change and poor governance arrangements.
Many cities appear to have problems with unclear and overlapping responsibilities amongst internal and external agencies, leading to operational dysfunction such as a multitude of agencies holding non-accessible spatial information. It is clear that solutions to problems facing megacities require concerted response from many internal units and regional and national agencies in areas such as planning, infrastructure, development and land use controls, transportation, environmental management and water management. Mandates might be clear, but rationalisation of functions and more effective levels of cooperation and information sharing are needed.
The visionary concept of using a SDI to more efficiently manage, access and use spatial information across megacities is evolving and megacities are at different stages of their implementation. However, most cities have no strategic framework to guide and create their SDI. This reflects the difficulty of the task to create an SDI within megacities that are organisationally complex and involve a large number of stakeholders with diverse sets of spatial information; a microcosm of the national problem.
The advances in developing megacity SDI will only occur when senior management within megacities are convinced of the benefits, through robust business cases based on evidence derived from experience, and the SDI implementation is guided by a supportive megacity information strategy. This support is difficult to achieve in the complex and multi-layer governance structures that exist around megacities. Bodies like GSDI have a role in encouraging use of best practices and disseminating information about these practices already developed in some jurisdictions.

SDI in Cities: State of Play (30)
Hartmut Mueller, Mainz University of Applied Sciences (Germany)

At present rapid worldwide urbanisation is a major challenge. Rapid growth of cities causes severe ecological, economical and social problems. It is difficult to manage this growth in a sustainable way.
Effective and comprehensive Spatial Data Infrastructures can help to resolve issues such as climate change, insecurity, energy scarcity, environmental pollution, infrastructure chaos and extreme poverty. The influence of large cities reaches out well outside their administrative boundaries to the peri-urban and regions beyond. It is essential that the greater region be managed holistically to maximise the economic benefits of the city. Regional planning places even greater emphasis on effective governance of the larger region, even across international boundaries, and cooperation in planning, development control and sharing information.
A comprehensive internet search covering the 26 largest cities of the world and including their hosting countries was performed in order to document the current status of SDI development in those cities. The evaluation constrains on the technical aspects of the use of spatial information technology in mega city management. The classification is done on the basis of usability and accessibility of spatial data which was identified by the internet search.
In some circumstances, a wealth of existing map, image and measurement data can already be found in areas such as land administration, natural resource management, marine administration, transportation, defence, communications, utility services and statistical collections. The challenge is for users both within and outside these areas of activity to break down the information silos and to discover, to access and to use this information to improve decision-making, business outcomes and customer services.
The study has found that spatial information and technology is being recognised widely as one of the tools needed to understand and address the big urban problems, but there is still a general lack of knowledge amongst communities of practice about what spatial solutions exist and how they can used and prioritised.
Information to support the management of cities is traditionally channelled and aggregated up the vertical information highway from a local, operational level to a policy level. In developed countries, urban growth and its characteristics can normally be measured through information derived from the Land Administration functions. However, in mega-cities within developing countries, where informal settlements are the norm, where growth is rampant and administrative structures limited then this traditional source of change information is not readily available.

Spatial Innovation for Cities (41)
Yerach Doytsher, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology (Israel)

Simultaneously with the rapid urbanization processes, mainly since the second half of the 20th century, major technological developments occurred and their impact on the surveying, mapping and geographic information communities is extremely significant. During the last decades new advanced hardware systems and sophisticated geospatial processing algorithms have been developed, thus affecting dramatically the traditional methods for data collection and data processing.
Following these rapid urbanization processes on the one hand, and the major technological developments on the other hand, the need for updated, precise and continuous representation of our natural environment in general and urban areas in particular, is nowadays one of the more urgent and major tasks the surveying and mapping community has to answer and provide adequate solutions. Major technological developments in data collection and data integration and analysis have been introduced as part of the ICT revolution. These new data acquisition technologies as well as methods, algorithms and software packages, have allowed surveyors, computer experts and the mapping community to provide rapid and frequent updating, integration and analysis of existing spatial databases, and moreover, deal with data volumes, resolution levels, and accuracies that were unknown until recently.
Within these new innovations can be mentioned: Data Collection Technologies (Photogrammetry, Field surveying and Global Positioning Systems, Cartographic digitization and scanning, Radar based systems and IfSAR imaging, LiDAR technology); Data integration (post processing and near real time map conflation and data fusion methods of spatial and semantic heterogeneous diverse information sources); 2D and 3D DTM/raster data integration of digital terrain models, and rectified and non-rectified aerial and satellite imagery); Construction of a seamless geospatial database (based on separate adjacent planimetric, topographic and cadastral separate maps); 3D City Modeling (buildings extraction from aerial images as well as from LiDAR data); Change Detection (automatic change detection algorithms for monitoring manmade structures and map updating); Urban Sensing (citizen activated sensors in the urban environment - such as cellular phones and RFID tagged items - enables to collecting and managing a wide range of urban information); and others.
The paper will describe the spatial innovations and their implementations as to efficient handling of urban areas in general and megacities in particular. It will be focused on the advantages of these spatial technological improvements for a professional urban and environmental management by the governmental and municipal administrations as well as for the benefits for urban inhabitants.
* Yerach has been part of a team writing a report entitled Megacities: Trends in Spatial Information Management: FIG Publication No 48 2010. Use of material from this study is acknowledged.


Parallel Session 4.2 (Room 303)
SDI Applications

Development of Marine Spatial Data Infrastructure in Japan (86)
Masanori Muto, Mitsubishi Research Institute, Inc., Tomohiko Tsunoda, Fumio Kumasaka (Japan)

The integration of marine information in Japan has been an issue since the Japanese Basic Act on Ocean Policy was enacted in 2007. In the Japanese Basic Plan on Ocean Policy in 2008 formulated upon this Act, it is pointed out that various kinds of marine-related information are now managed and provided independently by respective agencies based on their own purposes, and result in the inconvenience for users. In this sense, some sort of integrated marine information system needs to be established which could contribute to the development of marine industry, promotion of marine related activities as well as the implementation of sustainable marine governance. In this context, our team has initiated the study on marine information system dedicated for ocean governance fully funded by the Nippon Foundation (Japan Foundation). This project was implemented in consultation with Japan Coast Guard and some specialists in Japanese marine community. This paper describes the practice we have made in this two-year project. In the first year of this project, we have reviewed ocean data management system in other countries, and also collected the user requirements in Japanese ocean community. Upon all these basic research, we have identified the system requirements for the future ocean information system. In the second year (last year) of this project, we developed the prototype of Japanese marine information system based on the requirements identified in the first year research. This prototype is web-based GIS which manages marine spatial data (e.g. bathymetry, maritime limits, infrastructure, ferry route etc.) and all the related marine information including scientific marine observation data, legislation and restrictions specified in the Tokai area of Japan. This means all the related marine information became spatially enabled in this platform system. We have evolved this prototype in consultation with many users including government sectors, local autonomy, academic sectors, private sectors and NPOs etc. As the outcome of this two-year project, we have drafted the Guideline for developing future marine spatial data infrastructure in Japan. In this guideline, we have proposed the following items to be considered in developing future information system: 1) Establishment of Governing Board; 2) Coordination of Data Policy; 3) Standardization of Data and Metadata; 4) Provision of most-updated Data; 5) Partnership with Private Sector; 6) Definition and Consolidation of National Marine Spatial Data Infrastructure; 7) Provision of Multi-dimensional Data; 8) Seamlessness between Marine Data and Terrestrial Data; 9) Spatially Enabled Platform linking all the related Non-spatial Marine Information; 10) Simple User Interface open to all the People; 11) Availability of Output Data. Our proposal would contribute to the future discussions inside the Japanese marine community to develop the integrated marine information system or marine spatial data infrastructure of Japan.

Spatially Enabling Coastal Zone Management: Drivers, Design Elements, and Future Research Directions (14)
Rohan Bennett, Abbas Rajabifard, Sheelan Vaez (Australia)

This chapter provides an insight to the drivers, design elements and issues associated with spatially enabling the management of coastal zones, in particular coastal property rights, restrictions and responsibilities. Coastal zones are encumbered by hundreds of property rights, restrictions, and responsibilities. These are created to manage coastal population increases, climate change, and to deliver good governance. Currently, the interests are managed disparately across and between governments: sustainability requires these interests to be managed in an integrated fashion. Spatial enablement can deliver information integration and minimizes the need for redesigning legal, institutional and administrative frameworks. This is recognized in international, regional, and national coastal forums. Emerging concepts including Marine Cadastres, Marine SDI, Seamless SDIs, and Property Objects will inform the solution, however, this chapter suggests further research is required to fully understand the complete legal, administrative and technical arrangements in the coastal zone. Moreover, methods for streamlining the integration of property and non-property information are required, particularly the harmonization vertical datums. Finally, the feasibility of spatially enablement needs to be assessed.

Successful SDIs: Does the Marine Geo-Sector Provide a Much-Needed Beacon? (106)
Frederika Welle Donker, Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands)

With Directive 2007/2/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 March 2007 establishing an Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community (INSPIRE) in the process of being implemented in most EU Member States, the aim is to develop a European spatial data infrastructure. INSPIRE is to facilitate the exchange of geographic or spatial information in order to ensure integrated environmental policy-making (EC, 2007). Local spatial data infrastructures (SDIs) are slowly emerging, with the intention of linking these into national and even transnational SDIs. As local SDIs are being developed, many challenges have to be overcome, such as availability, accessibility, and standardisation. In addition, there are many non-technical issues to be addressed as well, such as intransparent and restrictive licences, complex pricing structures and organizational issues. In the literature ample attention is being paid to these issues –for example, legal issues in (Janssen 2009); financial issues in (Krek 2009; Welle Donker 2009) and cultural and organizational issues in (Koerten and Veenswijk 2009). These non-technical issues seem to increase with the number of organizations involved.
The focus of most SDI research has been on the land-based geo-sector. The marine geo-sector, however, also faces the same challenges as their land-based counterparts. Access to marine data is of vital importance for marine research, such as climate change prediction or off shore engineering. However, seas and oceans do not stop at national boundaries and the collection of marine data is highly fragmented. In the countries bordering the European seas there are hundreds of scientific data collecting laboratories ranging from public sector organizations to private industry. The collected data are not easily accessible, there is little standardization and validation remains a concern. The marine geo-sector also faces issues such as complex licence agreements and pricing structures, organizational and cultural differences.
Directed by legal requirements predating the INSPIRE Directive, the marine sector has already established transnational SDIs. Examples are SeaDataNet, having established a Pan-European infrastructure for ocean and marine data management (http://seadatanet.org), and the European Hydrographic Offices exchange of marine information in co-operations such as PRIMAR for developing European-wide electronic navigational charts. These SDIs appear to function successfully. Has the marine geo-sector really been successful in overcoming the non-technical challenges, and if yes, how have they achieved it? This paper will address these questions, based on an extensive case study carried out in 2010 as part of a PhD research. In particular, issues such as transparent and harmonized licences, accessibility, and availability for reuse by value-adding resellers will be tackled. Although the marine geo-sector is smaller than its land-based counterpart is, the findings of this case study may prove to be the beacon they so desperately need.
REFERENCES
EC (2007). Directive 2007/2/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 March 2007 establishing an Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community (INSPIRE). Official Journal of the European Union. L 108, vol. 50: 1-14.
Janssen, K. (2009). The EC legal framework for the availability of public sector spatial data. An examination of the criteria for applying the Access Directive, the PSI Directive and the INSPIRE Directive. PhD Thesis, Faculteit rechtsgeleerdheid. Leuven, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven: 482.
Koerten, H. and M. Veenswijk (2009). Narrating National Geo Information Infrastructures: Balancing infrastructure and innovation. Journal of Service, Science & Management 2: 334-347.
Krek, A. (2009). "Quantifying transaction costs of geoinformation: Experiments in national information structures in Sweden and Germany". in A. Krek, M. Rumor, S. Zlatanova and E. Fendel (Eds.) Urban Data Management Society Symposium 2009: Urban and Regional Data Management. Ljubljana, Slovenia, CRC Press/Balkema, Taylor & Francis Group, pp. 129-138.
Welle Donker, F. (2009). "Public sector geo web services: which business model will pay for a free lunch?" in B. van Loenen, J. W. J. Besemer and J. A. Zevenbergen (Eds) SDI Convergence: Research, Emerging Trends, and Critical Assessment. Delft, Nederlandse Commissie voor Geodesie / Netherlands Geodetic Commission (NCG). 48, 2009, pp. 35-51.

Issues and Challenges in Building Spatial Data Infrastructure in Timor-Leste, a Newly Independent State (44)
Toru Nagayama, Ministry of Justice, Romao Guterres, Paulino da Cruz, Vincent Fung (Timor-leste)

Timor-Leste (East Timor) is a Southeast Asian country that covers approximately 15,000 square kilometers of the Timor Island. The country has a population of approximately one million people and Dili is its capital city. Following Portuguese colonization, Timor-Leste was occupied and administered by Indonesia between 1975 and 1999. Established in 2000, UNTAET (United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor) supported the the country’s administration until Timor-Leste won its independence in 2002. Timor-Leste is now looking forward to its development and nation building - one of the youngest in the world.
During the last 10 years there has been substantial development in GIS (Geographic Information System) capacity, as well as the development and collection of spatial information. Today, various bilateral and international donor agencies sponsor GIS capacity-building and infrastructure development to support a wide range of government bodies and activities. Despite limited understanding of GIS, with the continuing support of donor agencies, GIS capabilities in Timor-Leste have gradually developed.
The Geographic Information Group (GIG), which is a non-profit and voluntary organization, provides a forum for exchanging views and ideas about policy and technology issues within the GIS field. The GIG is comprised of experts from government and international organizations, as well as individuals interested in spatial analysis, mapping and GIS. Since Timor-Leste has no legal or institutional GIS framework to guide the development of Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI), the GIG virtually functions as the national coordination body of GIS infrastructure within Timor-Leste. GIG’s achievements include designating a common national coordinate and projection system, as well as establishing GIS portal websites.
One of the most recent achievements made by GIG was the organization of a first-ever GIS Day event in Timor-Leste to raise awareness of the current and past GIS activities within Timor-Leste. With the participation of more than ten government institutions and international organizations, the event took place at Casa Europa, the European Commission’s Delegation Office to Timor-Leste, in November 2009. During the six days of the event, an exhibition of maps and use of GIS was open to the public, as well as a series of daily seminars educating and informing the public on various projects utilizing GIS in Timor-Leste.
While GIG’s achievements are considered to be the foundation for future development of a national SDI, a variety of challenges still remain in Timor-Leste, ranging from capacity building of national institutions, data standardization and systematic management, confirmation of administrative boundary and its datasets, to demarcation of border lines between Timor-Leste and Indonesia. In this transitional period, GIG will be a key player in addressing these issues through a collaborative team environment and with contributions from national and international resources.
The experiences of Timor-Leste are valuable and may be useful as case studies or resources for other developing countries, like Timor-Leste, that are looking ahead and taking steps to build SDI capacity and to utilize this to support socio-economic development.


Parallel Session 4.3 (Room 304)
Data Sharing: Institutional Issues

Assessing the Current Status of Data Sharing Preparedness in Rwanda (156)
Felicia O. Akinyemi, Centre for GIS and Remote Sensing, National University of Rwanda, Ernest Uwayezu (Rwanda)

A metadata web service referred to as the Rwanda Metadata Portal (RMP) was created recently to ease the discovery of existing spatial data on Rwanda. The RMP is a metadata search facility that is accessible over the internet. There is bound to be an increase in request for spatial datasets directed at the data producers from users who access the metadata web service. Up-till-now, there is no data sharing policy existing in any organisation in Rwanda and in its absence, it will be difficult to properly respond to data users’ requests.
The major goal of this study is to assess the preparedness of spatial data producers in Rwanda to share the data they produce. The assessment of the current situation was carried through a questionnaire survey. The assessment was conducted with the aim of knowing how they (data producers) currently share data, ascertain whether they do have a data sharing policy in place, examine their vision as regards how best to share the data they produce, the changes they anticipate in the future and the needed capacity to better respond to users’ request for spatial data.
Rwanda organizations, particularly the Centre for GIS and Remote Sensing of the National University of Rwanda (CGIS-NUR), which has assisted in producing majority of existing spatial data cannot properly respond to data request because there is no policy for sharing spatial data at present. Information from this assessment will inform the development of a data sharing policy. It will form the basis for defining an appropriate procedure for responding to users requesting for data as directed from the RMP. This effort in the long run would expedite developing a policy to be used for data sharing within the proposed National SDI.

Evaluating the Trends of Spatial Data Sharing Policies in Uganda (160)
Ernest Uwayezu, National University of Rwanda (Rwanda)

Public organizations in Uganda have individually adopted different spatial data sharing policies. Recommendations on the development of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure in Uganda invite public organizations to harmonize spatial data sharing policies. The study uses isomorphism theory to investigate if those organizations tend to harmonize spatial data sharing policies. The theory is applied in public administration sciences, and used in explaining how organizations adopt and diffuse similar behaviour when they cope with environment influences pushing them to adopt similar practices. The study uses interpretative techniques in analyzing data obtained from field work and existing literature on spatial data sharing in Uganda. It assesses if spatial data sharing policies followed by public organizations in Uganda change over time and reflect any pattern of isomorphism namely coercive, normative and mimetic.
Findings show that, initially, there exist two different policies followed by public organizations in Uganda in spatial data sharing. Some organizations follow the pricing policy and charge fees in sharing spatial data with public and private organizations and individuals, while others follow free access policy and share spatial data for free charge. Organizations which follow pricing policy face coercive forces resulting from the regulations and requirements pushing them to charge fees in spatial data sharing. Since 2000, those organizations have adopted new behaviour and started to share spatial data for free with other government organizations. Change in the behaviour reflects the normative process and relates to an increased awareness about appropriate ways for the cooperation in spatial data sharing between government organizations as stipulated in the decree related the development of the national Spatial Data Infra. The decree recommends adopting the principle of free exchange of key spatial datasets between government organizations. Furthermore, normative forces shape in similar way the behaviour of organizations which have adopted free access policy. Sharing spatial data for free allows the optimal use of spatial data for meeting organizations goals.

OneGeology Europe - Towards Harmonization of the Access and Licensing Policies of the European Geological Surveys (37)
Aleksandra Kuczerawy, ICRI - K.U.Leuven, Katleen Janssen, Jos Dumortier (Belgium)

OneGeology Europe is an eContentPlus project funded by the European Commission, the main objective of which is to create a harmonized 1: 1.000.000 geological map of Europe. Another goal of the project is to actively promote the use of geological spatial data held by the European Geological Surveys by making them interoperable, discoverable and accessible for public authorities, citizens and businesses. OneGeology-Europe aims to facilitate the spatial data accessibility of each layer of the process – data discovery, data access and data re-use.
In order to achieve these objectives, teams from several European countries work on different aspects of this goal. The challenging activities of the project include the technical issues like data specifications or data discovery; as well as non-technical issues like licensing policies and restrictions on data re-use.
An important part of the project is the legal workpackage. The main task of the legal team is to identify existing legal and policy barriers to the sharing and re-use of geological spatial data in Europe, and to develop access and licensing policies for the European Geological Surveys.
The development of the access and licensing policies took the form of a code of practice with model licences. Such a code and model licences could be used by all the European Geological Surveys and would stimulate harmonization while taking into account specific needs of the Surveys stemming from their national legal regimes. Throughout the project, the research conducted by the legal team has shown that building a single uniform access policy might be difficult to achieve in the current climate of the availability of geological data in Europe. The analysis of different European regimes revealed that despite the common framework introduced by the European Union, there are many ways of handling access and licensing issues. The observed differences stem mainly from distinct traditions, legal regulations and methods of financing national geological surveys.
Due to these circumstances the designed code had to ensure that apart from addressing issues that are easy to standardise, like information requirements, it also foresees solutions for more complicated matters where there is a need to provide flexible options for the Geological Surveys to choose from. Allowing them to adjust certain parts of the access and licensing policy is a necessary condition to stay in line with their national laws when addressing issues like pricing policies or a quid pro quo approach. The code also provides model licenses which will simplify and fasten the whole procedure of disseminating and obtaining geological spatial data. The model licenses are designed with attention to the INSPIRE drafting team’s work in order to maintain a high level of consistency between this work and the OneGeology-Europe project. Altogether the code of practice aims to facilitate the data accessibility by bringing access and licensing policies one step further towards harmonization at the European level.
This presentation will introduce the OneGeology – Europe code of practice and will show the work done in the process of its design.

UDOP: A Collaborative System for Geospatial Data (13)
A.J. Clark, Patton Holliday, John Clark, Jordon Mears, Robyn Chau (USA)

The aftermath of Haiti’s January 12 2010 earthquake typified disaster relief in that efficiency and situational awareness were reduced by the chaotic, uncoordinated influx of relief and aid. The lack of an environment in which information could be shared was a major component of this chaos. The application of geographic information (GIS) technology was a significant contribution to the relief efforts due to the centrality of location to issues of danger, resources, safety, communications, and so on, and due to the universal understanding of information rendered geospatially using 3D globes.
Concerned that existing solutions were restricting, U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) engaged Thermopylae to build a user-friendly GIS tool to reach a wide user base, fuse data from disparate sources, and immerse users in relevant content. The resulting SOUTHCOM 3D User-Defined Operational Picture (UDOP) united over 2,000 users to create, add, edit, update, and share data aggregated through GIS tools, existing databases, mobile applications and other resources, geospatially.
The UDOP was built on the enterprise geospatial framework, iSpatial™, which interacts with the Google Earth Plug-in™ browser application programming interface and provided SOUTHCOM’s Joint Intelligence and Operations Center with interactive applications and an open platform for the integration of dynamic data for timely and publicly-accessible solutions.The application of the UDOP to relief efforts in Haiti optimized the gathering and management of data from government, military, non-government agency, and first responder resources, which consequently improved relief efforts simply by inviting a large user community to share data on an intuitive common platform. The experience in and lessons learned from Haiti promise great strides into the future of the geospatial technology.


Parallel Session 4.4 (Room 305)
Web-Based Services for Discovery, Access and Processing

Address Geocoding Service in Chinese Taipei - A Case of SOA-based Web Application Development (39)
Jeremy Shen, Information Center, Ministry of the Interior, Eric Chang, Bruce Lan (Chinese Taipei)

The Ministry of the Interior (MOI) began to establish a national system for inquiry on coordinate values of spatial locations of building addresses through SOA (Service-oriented Architecture) based geocoding of addresses in 2009. The inquiry system of address locations is in a two-level structure, that is, application systems access the inquiry service component of Taiwan Geospatial One Stop (TGOS) at the first level and then, after TGOS 4A module (Authentication, Authorization, Accounting and Auditing) certification, are connected to the server and database for a county or city at the second level to obtain the locational coordinate values of the target addresses.
After the inquiry system of address locations is completed, developers of application systems for various government agencies do not need to collect and process address data to find out coordinates of address locations for specific administrative purposes. In addition, users can obtain real-time and complete data on locations of addresses from widely distributed local-level platforms through the national-level inquiry system of address locations, an Internet-based one-stop portal and mechanism for sharing geospatial data and minimizing duplication of efforts to set up databases.
The inquiry system makes central government units not responsible for collection and management of data, and makes the best use of existing address databases, incurring less costs of hardware and databases than field surveys of addresses. Furthermore, the inquiry system is a demonstration case of the cooperation between the central and local governments to promote SOA application, paving a way for boosting the integration of e-government with national GIS functions.

Building Bottom Up SDI's with the GeoNode Project (153)
Sebastian Benthall, OpenGeo, Stuart Gill (USA)

The new spatial data infrastructure will need to go beyond mere portals and integrate web GIS tools and social metadata features to encourage bottom up interest to complement the top down legal mandates.  Direct and collaborative participation are essential to effective cataloging and search.  GeoNode is a new open source software project that provides all this functionality and more in a single application.
GeoNode builds on mature open source projects like GeoServer, PostGIS, OpenLayers, GeoNetwork, GeoExt and Django in an OGC and REST-based architecture.  The integrated result provides the full power of a geospatial web services in an easily deployable package that is accessible to any user - not just trained GIS experts and systems administrators.  Each GeoNode forms a hub of collaboration where people share actual data, though can control who has access to it.
This talk will introduce GeoNode, its guiding principles, its features, and its roadmap.  It will also discuss the World Bank's use of GeoNode in the disaster risk management context as a case study.

BRISEIDE - BRIdging Services Information and Data for Europe. Spatio-Temporal Data Management and Processing in the Context of Civil Protection (101)
Raffaele De Amicis, Fondazione Graphitech, Giuseppe Conti, Federico Prandi (Italy)

The increasing number of natural disasters in the last 30 years, amplified by recent events, including the 2009 earthquake in Italy, forest fires occurred in Greece on 2008, flooding across Europe in the last years, highlight the need for interoperable added-value services to support environmental security. Many environmental analyses, e.g. monitoring a sequence of earthquakes epicenters, the evolution of a storm, the path of a forest fire, spread of pollutants etc., cannot be performed without considering the evolution, over time, of geographic features. For this reason providing access to harmonized data is only a first step towards delivering adequate support to environmental management, which in fact further requires the development of spatio-temporal data models and analysis functionalities.
The project BRISEIDE – “BRIdging Services Information and Data for Europe” responds to the aforementioned requirements by delivering an extension to the data models already available in the context of relevant INSPIRE themes as well as results of other past or ongoing EU projects, to include advanced spatio-temporal information. The extended data model will be implemented within several pilots providing access to number of added-value services which will be developed in the context of the project to ensure ingestion, querying, processing, visualization and processing of spatio-temporal information.

Web-service and Subsystems for Sharing Meteorological Data through Cyber-Infrastructure for Environmental Sensing and Modeling (137)
Byounghyun Yoo, Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (Singapore), Judson Harward (USA)

We introduce a web-service and its subsystems for scientific data exchange that is geographically referenced. This system has been designed for interdisciplinary research groups who conduct various scientific observations and generate their own scientific data in different environmental engineering area. These data include raw data from physical sensing and processed data from simulation, assimilation, and data processing. A cyber-infrastructure provides functionality for researchers to extend the longevity of their data, to facilitate data discovery, and to provide data access for authorized users. The cyber-infrastructure is intended to utilize a federated data repository model in which individual research projects will provide their own data storage either on standard file servers or in relational database management systems.
This paper introduces central cyber-infrastructure and focuses on functionality and mechanism of federated data repository model. We implemented a data repository utilizing initial sensor data from an urban meteorology project of residential area in Singapore for validation of our system architecture. In order to provide mechanisms for data discovery by other researchers as well as data access for authorized users, produced data is managed with spatial-relational database management system. The data is geographically referenced for efficient discovery in geospatial context. Domain knowledge and metadata is captured from data producer and used for design of backend database system.
The data Repository has two major components. For the data provider, there is a web service interface for data submission and publication, and for data discovery and sharing through the central cyber-infrastructure, there is a separate web service interface that communicates with the distributed data broker of the central cyber-infrastructure.
The data provider uses a server-side application that provides a web-based user interface to enable uploading, parsing and storing of data in the data repository. Metadata of each data generated from the data provider takes important roles in this system for providing data alignment and communication with the central cyber-infrastructure.
A web-based query interface supports data exports in a variety of common file formats such as Excel, Word, XML, CSV, and PDF. Other available tools enable interactive web-based visualizations and geospatial representations of datasets. This allows query output to be immediately displayed in geo-web environment.
This data repository model will grow into a general data exchange facility with the central cyber-infrastructure for environmental sensing and modeling research.


Parallel Session 4.5 (Room 306)
International Geospatial Society Round Table
Moderators: Mabel Alvarez, President and Lilia Patricia Arias. Vice-President, International Geospatial Society

This roundtable is hosted by GSDI through the Geospatial Information Society (IGS) as the individual membership arm, recently constituted to engage and enhance communications globally among individuals that are actively involved in promoting, developing, or advancing spatial data infrastructures and related themes. The main issues about IGS goals will be presented. Organizers invite the geospatial community to suggest and discuss about the most important IGS strategies and projects to formulate the Work Plan as well as the mechanisms to increase participation, membership and communication. Applications for membership will be provided at the meeting for those who might be interested on contributing to the consolidation of IGS. All interested parties are invited to join and conclude about the future activities that will define the future of IGS as a representative of the geospatial community worldwide.


Parallel Session 5.1 (Theater)
SDI Experiences: National to Municipal

National SDI Implementation Experiences across Europe
Claudio Mingrino, Intergraph

forthcoming

Ontology Based SDI to Facilitate Spatially Enabled Society (168)
Abolghasem Sadeghi-Niaraki, Inha University, Incheon (Republic of Korea), Abbas Rajabifard (Australia), Kyehyun Kim, Jungtaek Seo (Republic of Korea)

Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) development is moving more toward a user-centric platform to facilitate a decision-making in a spatially enabled society. A user-centric SDI pays more attention to user’ preferences during data gathering and services (or/and infrastructure) designing. The first and second generations of SDI initiatives mainly are based on data-centric and process-based views. In the data-centric view, data are gathered and then services are designed based on data and finally the results are delivered to the users. But as this structure is not fully based on user's preferences, the user may not be happy using the services. In the user-centric view, users do necessarily need raw data but they need special data and services with respect to their preferences and needs. In order to facilitate this requirement ontologies are used to indicate a formally represented knowledge that is mainly used to improve data sharing and information retrieval in the user-centric SDI. Hence, the objective of this study is to develop an ontology based user-centric SDI using a route finding architecture as an example of spatial enablement to facilitate spatially enabled society. In this architecture, ontology facilitates SDI’ services particularly the route finding analysis in a spatially enabled society.

Municipal Geospatial Enterprise Architecture (68)
Farhad Samadzadegan,University of Tehran (Islamic Republic Of Iran), Ahmad Farhadipour (Guyana), Hamid Kiavarz Moghaddam (Islamic Republic Of Iran)

An Enterprise organization such as metropolitan municipality should provide a common platform for data collection, storage, authorized and secure access to spatial and a spatial data, harmonize the work flow of respective departments and disseminate information for the benefit of public at large. Moreover, municipality activities require interoperability both between municipality offices, and government and private sector. Nevertheless, due to the lack of well designed infrastructure and architecture of information, traditional municipalities, and governments face serious problems and are mainly have poor quality and high cost of services, and low economical revenues. Municipal Enterprise Architecture is the explicit description and documentation of the current and desired relationships among business and management processes and information technology (IT) in Municipalities. It defines a framework in which one describes all the work Municipalities activities and justifies the investments of personnel, data, and applications within an enterprise.
Geospatial Information Technology (GIT) provides e-municipality governments with extraordinary quantitative and qualitative benefits. Municipal GIT will largely address the needs of various local government departments such as Local Administration, Public Works & Engineering department, Public Health Department, Water supply, Land records. The identification of geospatial capabilities in municipalities business and IT planning is needed for a variety of reasons in an enterprise architecture: 1) Geospatial information is used in a majority of business settings in and outside of municipalities, 2) Geospatial information and services are not addressed consistently within and between urban organizations, 3) Interoperability among providers and consumers of geospatial data and services of municipalities requires a common understanding of semantics and functional capabilities.
This paper presents the technical specifications of geospatial enterprise architecture of Tehran municipality. Adapted geospatial profile uses the five FEA reference models as taxonomy to define components of geospatial segment architecture. The Federal Segment Architecture Methodology (FSAM) is used to provide a structured process for assembling geospatial segment architectures. A segment architecture is a detailed results-oriented architecture and a transition strategy addressing a vertical or horizontal portion (or segment) of the enterprise. Segment architecture helps architects understand the current state of geospatial capabilities, identifies where geospatial stakeholders would like to make improvements, and allows for transformation of agency business processes to a more efficient state

Geospatial Strategic Planning for Isfahan Municipality (90)
Morteza Sadeghi, Department of information and communication technology, Isfahan municipality, Homayoon YazdanPanah. Ali Hosseini, Mahmood Sabagh (Islamic Republic Of Iran), Abbas Rajabifard (Australia)

Nowadays, globalization and rapid changes in developing countries affect the behavior and culture of people. Adapting to these changes is the vital means to remain in the competition of being a developed society. One of the most important changes is the relationship between humans and land which have evolved by way of many parameters such as globalization, urbanization, technological and economic reform. In order to be able to adapt this changing relationship it is required to enable societies by developing new infrastructures and tools. Strategic planning is a key concept for effective and successful development of these infrastructures and tools which have to be considered by the governments and decision makers.
The municipality of Isfahan, a metropolitan city in the central part of the Iran, in 2006 established a strategic plan for spatial data and services infrastructure and its first revision and evaluation has been done in 2009. This paper describing the principals of spatial strategic planning in multi-unit organizations, such as municipalities, the results of establishing this strategic plan in Isfahan municipality is also presented. The geospatial strategic plan in this project had four stages including comparative studies, investigating high level related documents, developing visions and missions and designing GIS strategic plan using SWOT analysis.
In this study, major strategies and policies are proposed in the domains of geospatial businesses (GB), geospatial systems and services (GSS), geospatial data (GD) and Geospatial information technology (GIT). In order to achieve the high level performance, different infrastructure components for enabling geospatial businesses, projects for geospatial enabling systems and services, projects for enabling geospatial data acquisition and different projects for enabling geospatial information technology are proposed.Concentrating on spatial data and service infrastructures and capacity building, an evaluation of an ongoing plan has also been done to check the compliance of that with the new changes and conditions. The evaluation illustrates that the plan leads to better realizing spatially enabling Isfahan municipality to deliver better services to its citizens.his paper aims as describing the principals of spatial strategic planning in multi-unit organizations, such as municipalities and presents the results of establishing this strategic plan in Isfahan municipality.


Parallel Session 5.2 (Room 303)
SDI in Land Administration (Joint FIG and GSDI Session)

Spatially Enabling Australia: Designing a National Infrastructure to Manage Land Information (55)
Jude Wallace, Brian Marwick, Rohan Bennett, Abbas Rajabifard, and Ian Williamson (Australia)

Spatially enabled societies demand accurate and timely information about land. Australia’s land administration systems are state and territory based, administered by independent agencies. These arrangements have served the nation well. However, Australia’s increasingly national economic, environmental, and social management priorities challenge their design and capacity. Land management issues now require approaches based on need, not jurisdiction. Information to found sound policymaking at a national level is also essential.
Indeed, a national infrastructure for managing land information is an obvious tool needed by governments at all levels: national, state and territory and local. Given Australia’s complex federal arrangements, an infrastructure built on existing systems that negates the need for a new national federal agency appears to be the optimal approach. In order to achieve this workable national infrastructure, eight design elements must be developed: a shared vision, a common language or ontology, a governance framework, a business case for change, selection of a data model, an accompanying technical infrastructure, an implementation/maintenance model, and an international compatibility framework. An analysis of the key national drivers and emerging international initiatives is needed to ensure that these elements, and any others that are identified, suit national needs. Extensive future research is required to achieve each of the eight design elements in the context of drivers and global trends.

Land Information Challenges in Indonesia (64)
Peter Laarakker, Cadastre, Land Registry and Mapping Organisation (The Netherlands), Suyus Windanaya (Indonesia)

To meet the Land Policy challenges in Indonesia in the field of agrarian reform, development planning, development of land and real estate market, infrastructure and environmental issues, the availability of adequate land information is of utmost importance.
Indonesia is aware that this availability can only be realised by extensive use of information and communication technology and many initiatives have started to automate the production, storage and use of land information. Progress however has not been optimal, challenges have arisen in the field of regulatory framework, available budgets, mandates and availability of trained staff to run the new systems.
To a certain extend these kind of problems have appeared anywhere in the world where paper based working methods were replaced by computerized ones. At first automated systems were developed on “islands” but after a while organisations started to discover that automated communication between these systems was difficult, creating the need for a much stronger coordination between these organisations than was usual before. The installment of these coordinating mechanisms lead also to the possibilty to make maximum use of the developed IT systems; the development of (spatial) data infrastructures lead to efficient and customer friendly electronic government initiatives. It took very much time to develop this new way of working. Organisations were not used to this strong level of cooperation and greater inter-dependencies. It needed a cultural change that took many years.
Indonesia has to make this change in a much shorter period of time. At one side advanced IT systems are available from the first moment of automation, on the other side the Land Policy challenges are serious and the political pressure to solve them is high. It was decided to develop a National Land Information System. With the development of an NLIS, the field of land information comes in a new phase of application of IT. The necessary investments in IT knowledge and IT organisation are high.
The paper gives an overview of different IT initiatives in the field of land information in Indonesia against the background of the model for Business-IT alignment of Henderson and Venkatraman. The paper also discusses the possible coordinating mechanisms in such situations.

A Proposed Service Oriented Architecture for e-Land Administration- Case Study: Isfahan Metropolis, Iran (95)
Behnam Tashayo, Faculty of Geodesy & Geomatics Engineering, K.N. Toosi University of Technology, Morteza Sadeghi, Ali Mansourian, Mohammad Saadi Mesgari, Saeed Nadi (Islamic Republic of Iran)

Developing e-land administration systems have proven to be crucial for realizing e-government. Land administration systems in different countries are developed through consideration of existing economical, societal and legal structures. E-land administration includes the coordination among various parts of land administration businesses, online customer services, private partnership services and internal workflows. A variety of organizations collaborate in land administration due to the diversity of activities in this business. Therefore, it is necessary to utilize appropriate frameworks and technologies to assist the organizations in implementing seamless land administration. Although, currently, various initiatives exist to establish the coordination in land administration, there are still many deficiencies especially in data transferring and inter-organization processes.
Since 2009, the municipality of Isfahan, as one of the major cities located in the centre of Iran, has been developing the Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) platform. Using this platform, in this study a web-based tool based on service oriented architecture (SOA) has been designed and implemented for approaching the seamless land administration. Different methods like Orchestration and Choreography have been also identify to harmonize web services in this study. In Orchestration a central coordinator is responsible to coordinates web services and choreography, supports modeling and enactment of inter-organizational business processes consisting of autonomous organizations. Therefore, Orchestration can manage workflow in organizations and choreography can coordinate activities in an inter-organizational workflow.
This paper explores an integrated utilization of these two methods mentioned above to develop a seamless land administration system for Isfahan metropolis. A technique for composing the methods using WPS(Web Processing Service) standard is also proposed. In addition a prototype system has been developed to further investigate the proposed methods. Web service technologies and OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) frameworks are utilized for the development of the prototype system to satisfy data interoperability in an SDI environment. The paper finally explains that service oriented architecture of the system can resolve many issues related to the coordination.

Land Administration Challenges in Bhutan: The Need for a National Cadastral Resurvey (121)
Stig Enemark, President, International Federation of Surveyors (FIG) and Aalborg University (Denmark)

Bhutan is a small landlocked country facing the Himalaya mountain range. The area is about 38,000 sq. km and only about 7% is arable. The country has a strong cultural heritage and is committed to sustainable development through their plan of "Gross National Happiness". The presentation gives a brief overview of the recent accomplishments in Bhutan in terms of establishing a national cadastral resurvey as a key means of implementing their overall future land policy.


Parallel Session 5.3 (Room 304)
Data Sharing: Institutional Issues

AuScope Grid: Spatial Information Services Stack (36)
Ryan Fraser, CSIRO, Guillaume Duclaux, Robert Woodcock (Australia)

AuScope is an integrated national geosciences framework being built as a component of the Australian National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy. The AuScope Grid element is a project to develop national spatial data infrastructure using open standards to allow real time access to data, information and knowledge stored in distributed repositories. AuScope Grid draws together information from new initiatives and existing sources in academia, industry and government.
AuScope Grid’s infrastructure is called the Spatial Information Services Stack (SISS) and it is being deployed using and further developing infrastructure components from multiple open source projects in various domains to promote interoperability of spatial data. The stack has been used to deploy OGC Web Map and Web Feature Services (WMS/WFS), service registration (CSW) and vocabulary services, and for the development of community application schemas. The key to linking resources in this Community Earth Model is web-service access to geoscience information holdings and computational services, using common service interfaces and standard (i.e. community agreed) information models.
An example of where SISS has been deployed is the Australian State Government Geological Surveys in support of their earth resource data using EarthResourceML. EarthResourceML is an extension of GeoSciML, the IUGS developed language for exchange of geological map features. Each State and Territory Geological Survey has an earth resource database, storing information on mineral occurrences, commodities, historical production, reserves and resources, deposit classification and the like, each with its own format and sets of attributes and vocabularies. An OGC Web Feature Service has been deployed in each jurisdiction, which maps the local database to the common exchange model, thus allowing the clients to query and consume the earth resource data from the distributed databases. Additionally, SISS’s vocabulary service has been used to match locally used terms to community agreed terms. This overcomes differences due to language, spelling, synonyms and local variations.

Access Control Systems for Spatial Data Infrastructures and Their Administration (148)
Jan Herrmann, Technische Universität München (Germany)

Today sophisticated concepts, languages and frameworks exist, that allow implementing powerful fine grained access control systems for protecting Web Services and spatial data in SDIs. Especially rule based access control systems provide the capabilities to define and enforce expressive, fine grained access rights or restrictions respectively. Having powerful and complex access control policies in place introduces a new challenge. It is essential that the policy defining the semantics of an access control system can be easily and securely administrated. In this paper it is shown how access to spatial data and services of SDIs can be controlled. Aditionally a very general and powerful administrative model, the Layered Administration Model (LAM), will be introduced. The LAM intends to support an easy, distributed, hierarchical administration of complex spatial access control policies as found in SDIs

A Regional Collaborative Network to Improve Spatial Information Sharing in Australia (98)
Dev Raj Paudyal, University of Southern Queensland, Kevin McDougall, Armando Apan (Auatralia)

Good outcomes in Natural Resource Management (NRM) rely largely upon effective mechanism to access and share spatial information. The largest body of spatial information is located within state government organisations and the current spatial information access and sharing mechanisms are managed by these agencies. Though various initiatives have been initiated by governments for building Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI), the access and use of spatial information for NRM sector is problematic. Regional NRM groups are also collecting a significant amount of spatial information and state agencies are also interested in gaining access to this spatial data/information. There is an urgent need to bridge between the state approach and regional activities in an innovative way.
The aim of this paper is to explore the theoretical background for collaborative networks and examine the applicability of the regional collaborative network concept to improve spatial information sharing for informed decision making in NRM sector. Five spatial information sharing components are explored and based on those components, a comparison of the existing spatial information sharing approach and collaborative network approach has been presented. An overview of regional NRM bodies and information sharing in Australia has been discussed. A case study approach has been selected to apply the collaborative network approach for current NRM portal development. A comparative study of data hub projects in Queensland has been completed. This paper concludes that regional collaborative networks can facilitate the improvement of spatial information sharing and spatial data infrastructure development.

Location Privacy and National Security (92)
Bastiaan van Loenen, Delft University of Technology (Netherlands)

Location based services (LBS) are among ICT developments that potentially put the privacy of individuals at risk. LBS technology allows for tracking and tracing the location of mobile phones or other terminal equipment. The increased possibility to know people’s whereabouts, both in a geographical and temporal sense, is posing the question of possibility versus desirability with regard to location privacy. The central question that this article aims to answer is how may location privacy needs of cell phone users be balanced with national security needs of society? Through a study of literature and rulings of the European Court of Human Rights a balancing framework was developed. The framework allowed for the assessment of the situation in the Netherlands, Germany and Canada with respect to the location data from mobile devices used by intelligence and security agencies to protect the national security. The research shows that the balancing should account for the totality of the circumstances. As for general interferences with the right to privacy also interferences with location privacy are very context-sensitive. A true balancing should be accomplished on a case-by-case basis. It is not a priori to be determined whether and to what extent location privacy is at stake. In all case studies similar requirements were found that should be taken into account in the decision what means to use in which instances. From the available published data, we expect that the use of these means varied among the case studies significantly, however. A proper balancing strongly builds on the balancing process, especially when balancing is very context-sensitive. This process should be just with adequate safeguards against abuse.


Parallel Session 5.4 (Room 305)
Web-Based Services for Discovery, Access and Processing

Rich Internet GeoWeb Service for Spatial Data Infrastructure (110)
Tin Seong KAM, School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University, Lian Chee KOH (Singapore)

In this information age, more and more public statistical data such as population census, household living, local economy and business establishment are distributed over the internet within the framework of spatial data infrastructure. By and large, these data are organized geographically such as region, province as well as district. Usually, they are published in the form of digital maps over the internet as simple points, lines and polygons markers limited or no analytical function available to transform these data into useful information. To meet the analytical needs of casual public data users, we contribute RIGVAT, a rich internet geospatial visual analytics tool to allow casual data users to explore and analyse these data over the internet with great user experience. We demonstrate the potential of RIGAT through the use of treemaps dynamically linked to interactive map to explore and analyse large spatio-temporal property transaction data provided by the national government agencies.

A Process-Based Framework to Enable the Transition from Geospatial Web Services to Geospatial Web Applications (43)
Javier Morales, Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), University of Twente, Rolf de By (Netherlands)

During the last couple of years, we have witnessed an increase in the number of geoservices available on the Web. This growth can be attributed to the availability of frameworks that enable the utilization of geo-resources across The Web using standardised interface specifications. This development is both an opportunity and a challenge. There is the opportunity to use this raw material to build robust Web applications, which have been the long-term vision of SDIs. Web applications however, encompass complex systems providing interactive, data-intensive, customisable functionality that is assembled over ever-changing needs of users in the geospatial community and society as a whole. Building these applications presents a serious engineering challenge. These applications, which are called workflow-based Web applications, not only have varying degrees of complexity but also span multiple organisations. This results in having to deal with the inherent complexity of the services, the autonomy of the service providers and the need for workflows to be robust and flexible. Examples of these full-fledged Web applications include e-government, emergency response systems, and public administration applications as in permit issuance support.
Developing these applications is the next natural step in the evolution of spatial data infrastructures. In this paper, we address this engineering challenge by presenting a development framework to structure combinations of geoservices to build Web applications in an SDI environment. We focus on the patterns of communication between SDI nodes. An SDI node is a moderately to highly complex information system with usually a long lifetime that provides access to geospatial resources via geoservices. Groups of geoservices are assembled to form Web applications. We define this assembly in a declarative way and call such a process specification. Each process specification defines an intended process logic, i.e. an intended communication pattern. We formalise this logic as a synchronisation of actions that take place in separate independent systems. Process specifications can be validated against intended requirements. They are instantiated to realise functionality that a user experiences as a Web application. An instance of a process specification is known more popularly as a geo-processing workflow. The systematic approach presented in the paper is illustrated with a run-through example.

Integrating Spatial Planning and Decision Support System Infrastructure and Spatial Data Infrastructure (82)
Luc Boerboom, University of Twente, Ozgun Alan (Netherlands)

We discuss several recent developments in web processing services that now facilitate the web-based connection of spatial software applications into infrastructures. We apply these developments to spatial planning and decision support systems in general and spatial multi-criteria evaluation in particular to explore to what extent we can speak of spatial planning and decision support system infrastructure. The consequence is that these planning and decision support system applications become not only nodes in spatial data infrastructures, but also infrastructures in and of themselves.
However, we reveal that no literature from academia or practice exists on planning and decision support infrastructure. Only literature about planning and decision support systems exists. Therefore we apply the routes traveled from information systems to information infrastructure to spatial decision support systems in order to explore the gaps that need to be filled, and to find gaps that are being filled such as ontology development for decision support systems.
We illustrate socio-technical challenges of integration of application and data infrastructures with a project that is developing a spatial multi-criteria evaluation model that serves three different forest management organizations in respectively the Alsace in France, the state of Rheinland-Pfalz in Germany and the United Kingdom. It is a generic open source application that integrates web services and web-processing services and that will be applied to evaluate climate change impacts across regions in and between the different countries. We describe the three different (spatial) data infrastructure environments.
Given the current state for the art, we will particularly address the technical constraints of developing spatial planning and decision support system infrastructure, and we focus on a technical conceptual framework underlying this particular project that could be a basis for more generic conceptual frameworks for development of spatial planning and decision support infrastructure and its integration with spatial data infrastructure.
But before we can enter in further discussions we review different definitions of spatial planning and decision support systems, since some authors will consider any system generating information used in a planning or decision process a support system. We on the other hand will follow a more narrow definition, which differentiates the study of spatial data infrastructures from the study of spatial planning and decision support system infrastructures.

OpenGeo: A 'dot-org' to Build the Open Geospatial Web (152)
Chris Holmes, OpenGeo (USA)

This talk will discuss OpenGeo, a social enterprise that competes in the market in order to sustain its mission of an Open Geospatial Web.  The primary goal is not to make money for investors, but rather to build great open source software that supports Spatial Data Infrastructure initiatives. It does this by selling services for full cost recovery, in a non-profit structure. The organization employs the top developers on best of breed geospatial tools: PostGIS, GeoServer, GeoWebCache and OpenLayers.
OpenGeo supports their work by marketing and selling 'The OpenGeo Suite', promoting the software against proprietary vendors, and offering enterprise quality support and service contracts.  The goal is a win-win-win for all:
* Open source software wins, as developers are supported financially to work full-time on improving the software
* Institutional customers win, as they finally have access to a one-stop support shop for complex open source spatial deployments
* Open source users win, as the software they depend on accesses a sustainable funding stream to continue maintenance and development;
* Core developers win, by getting to do what they love for a living.
ncluded in the presentation will be the history, philosophy and goals of OpenGeo and OpenPlans, its parent organization.  The roadmaps and goals of the OpenGeo Suite and the new SDI-focused GeoNode project will also be covered.


Parallel Session 5.5 (Room 306)
Societal Impacts Committee Round Table
Carmelle Terborgh, Esri, and Al Stevens, FGDC (USA)

The committee welcomes new members to join us as we find ways that SDI can make a positive societal impact.  The focus of the meeting will be to look at new ways for the GSDI Societal Impacts Committee to engage - including a new capacity building initiative and ideas for further SDI program sponsorships.  In addition, we will review progress made to date through the GSDI Association Small Grants program and GSDI Developing Nations Fund, and review the call for proposals for the 2010 Small Grants program and the notes of our most recent virtual committee meeting in September, 2010.  All interested parties are invited to join the committee and contribute to achieving work plan tasks to be itemized at this meeting.  Volunteer to do something good for others and we guarantee you will feel good about your contributions made through this committee. This roundtable is being hosted and organized by the GSDI Societal Impacts Committee. Please review the tentative workplan if possible before attending.


Parallel Session 6.1 (Theater)
SDI Capacity Building

Building an SDI as a Community Project - Challenges in Emerging Economies (4)
Ainura Nazarkulova, ACA*GIScience at KSUCTA, Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan), Josef Strobl, Mariana Belgiu (Austria)

This paper is focused on the entire framework of establishing national and regional Spatial Data Infrastructures in regions with fundamental administrative, economic and organizational restructuring. Based on experience from a GSDI small grants projects aiming at developing prototype of demonstrator SDI components for the Kyrgyz Republic and Central Asia, recommendations and guidelines are proposed, complemented with simple observations of what to watch out for.
Particularly in ‘emerging economies’ the role and importance of Geographic Information as a core infrastructure for administration, development and businesses cannot be underestimated. At the same time, discontinuities in administration and disruptive developments in societies and economies are a substantial obstacle in building the general understanding of open and shared infrastructures. Obvious stakeholders and key actors frequently are not ready to step on a common and transparent platform, the protection of ‘turfs’, the perception of information as power and lack of integrity are critical obstacles.
While there are technical obstacles in the regional power, ICT and human resources infrastructures, organizational, qualification and societal factors are considered the main hurdles to overcome when aiming at the development of open SDIs reaching beyond re-labeling the activities of e.g. a national mapping agency. Interestingly, international organizations and NGOs currently are the most active and open potential partners and contributors towards a truly collaborative regional SDI.
The mentioned joint project chose the strategy of developing and implementing demonstrator SDI components, in order to effectively convey the overall idea of an SDI, to communicate its value for a broad range of activities and to offer a platform for teaching and learning. This demonstrator is centered around a catalog service implemented with a draft regional metadata profile. Accessed via a portal engine, this discovery environment offers access to a range of local and regional data sets hosted on a dedicated services infrastructure, as well as links to other catalog services.
In the second phase of the project additional institutions or ‘orphaned data sets’ will be integrated, and the main emphasis will shift towards educational activities in order to demonstrate the architecture of an SDI, help with understanding potential benefits, and motivate to join this kind of shared, community-based activity where the core infrastructure elements are contributed by academic institutions aiming at supporting all actors ranging from government through NGOs to business.
The principle of ‘sharing information is more important than having it’ still has a long way to go to be fully understood and embraced. Education and communication is the only way of getting there.

E-Learning Training for Spanish Compulsory Secondary Education (ESO) Teachers to Use SDI as an ICT Educational Resource (56)
María Ester Gonzalez, MERCATOR Research Group, Technical University of Madrid (UPM), Miguel Ángel Bernabé (Spain)

The fast development of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and their progressive implementation in the educational field has led to significant changes in teaching and learning methodologies and has made the use of new teaching resources in the classroom a top priority.
ICT offer a huge amount of educational resources. In this context Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) is available at all levels (from global to local) and presents different possibilities to be used as ITC teaching resources. However, the use of SDI in Spanish Compulsory Secondary Education (ESO) requires that teachers are trained to be acquainted with the features and applications of this technological tool.
In order to provide the adequate teacher training, both theoretical and practical, three e-learning courses have been designed, developed and implemented for three different areas of Spanish ESO (Social Sciences, Natural Sciences and Technology). In these courses we propose the use of SDI as ICT teaching resources. The courses present a theoretical lesson which includes: (a) the most important concepts in SDI and a general vision about them and (b) methodological proposals which approach ESO curricula using SDI as a teaching resource.
In this paper we present the implementation and evaluation stages, showing the results of the first edition of the courses in which teachers from several Latin American countries took part. These results have enabled us to obtain information about the opinion of secondary teachers regarding the possibility of using SDI to teach Social Sciences, Natural Sciences and Technology curricula.

Social Networks and Web 2.0 Tools as a Good Complement to the Local SDI's (117)
Mabel Alvarez, Universidad Nacional de la Patagonia San Juan Bosco (Argentina), Tatiana Delgado Fernández, Rafael Cruz Iglesias (Cuba)

Social networks and Web 2.0 tools for different purposes have advanced significantly in recent years.
The Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI’s) are not easily understood as the infrastructure of gas, water or roads. This fact makes their benefits are not always seen by policy makers and citizens in some places, mainly in local environments. Consequently, available resources, experiences gained and lessons learned in the Spatial Data Infrastructure field, are not taken into account or undervalued.
The use of Web 2.0 tools and social networks can be of effective help for the understanding of the SDI’s and its implementation process, particularly in local environments.
This paper describes experiences in Cuba with respect to local SDI’s and applications of the Web 2.0 tools and social networks in local, national and transnational contexts.
The local SDI’s experiences in Cuba have taken place after the implementation of the National SDI in the country.
The experiences in social networks and Web 2.0 tools have been implemented for the purpose of information dissemination, training or knowledge management in the context of initiatives or research projects and applied to the Geospatial Information or other issues.
The paper concludes with some considerations concerning local Spatial Data Infrastructures and its benefits, steps for implementation and support that Web 2.0 tools and social networks can offer to this end.

SDI In Geoinformatics Education and Training At Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (122)
Mohamad Nor Said, Department of Geoinformatics, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Mohamad Ghazali Hashim (Malaysia)

In realizing the government initiatives towards establishing a really working Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI), efforts in educating various levels of society are very important. Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) has initiated a postgraduate program in Geographical Information System (GIS) since 1990, alongside with a number of informal professional trainings conducted for government and private agencies. As digital data significantly grows and the demands for geospatial data management and analysis are seen increasing, a formal academic program of Geoinformatics at undergraduate level has been introduced in 1994 and until now more than 500 graduates have been produced. In this program, various SDI-related topics are covered with an emphasis varying from introductory SDI concepts to the latest development of looking more on marine SDI. Students are also exposed to the current initiatives introduced and undertaken by the Malaysian Centre for Geospatial Data Infrastructure (MaCGDI) especially on the development of National Geospatial Data Centre (NGDC) and State Geospatial Data Centre (SGDC) which needs a thorough understanding of Malaysian Standard (MS1759), data translation, coordinate transformation, geographical names, etc.
Amongst the major issues in developing the Malaysian SDI is the lack of GIS professionals in the government departments who can and should play effective roles in various programs as organized and coordinated by MaCGDI. Even though the number of graduates is considerably sufficient, they are currently employed only by the private companies due to the unavailability of civil service scheme in the Malaysian Public Service Department (PSD) that can cater for this need. This very urgent issue is being resolved by the National Committee on Mapping and Spatial Data (JPDSN) lead by the Department Survey and Mapping Malaysia (JUPEM). As for a temporary measure, short courses to staff of various government agencies are conducted either by UTM’s own initiative or co-organized with MaCGDI.
This paper elaborates the curriculum design of the UTM’s Bachelor of Science (Geoinformatics) by taking into account, amongst other courses, the current and future needs in geospatial data management whereby SDI-related topics are introduced. It also explains the way the program is conducted as well as supports from various stakeholders (government and private companies). On top of this formal education, other training activities involving various government departments and private agencies are also highlighted.


Parallel Session 6.2 (Room 303)
SDI in Land Administration (Joint FIG and GSDI Session)

Evolution of Spatial Data Infrastructures Through Land Administration Projects (111)
Norval Young, University of Twente, Walter de Vries (The Netherlands)

We start from the assumption that spatial data infrastructures (SDIs) co-evolve naturally with the implementation of spatial policy directives, strategic spatial data related interventions and spatial data coordination activities. Based on this assumption, in Vietnam a sequence of land administration projects (LAPs) which involved can have contributed to the evolution of the SDI in Vietnam. The key question of this paper is however to determine the degree to which SDIs have evolved through LAPs, and to understand to what extent these LAPs have affected the natural course of the SDI.
To address this question, we defined SDI as the combination of 4 components, which can each change over time. These components were the basis for data collection. The data collection consisted of interviews and online questionnaires distributed to individuals from land administration organizations, universities and other land related organizations at the central, provincial and district levels.
We observed that despite the presence of formal mandates describing how organizations should interact with each other most of the interactions rely on personal contacts. Furthermore, the gap between land administration projects and policy inclusion influences the way in which the SDI is regulated as there is no prescribed format through which the SDI should evolve. As a result of the gap, adoption of SDI related technology is predominantly at the central and province levels of public administration thus ignoring the lowers levels as well as across-level collaboration. Additionally, at these levels, the technology is merely used for land registration and land use planning (routine land administration tasks).
We conclude that twenty year of SDI evolution in Vietnam has occurred in parallel to the evolution in land administration projects. Often when projects come to an end, many SDI related activities are interrupted until other projects are implemented. Hence, Vietnam does not possess the readiness that is required for a more natural SDI evolutionary path, and the evolution of SDIs through land administration projects has not been effective.

Spatially Enabling Survey & Land Registration Bureau of Bahrain for Better Management of Property Transactions (125)
Neeraj Dixit, Survey & Land Registration Bureau, Ammar Rashid Kashram (Bahrain)

Survey & Land Registration Bureau [SLRB] is the national authority that organizes, registers, and documents all survey activities - Cadastral, Topographic and Hydrographic & property transactions within the Kingdom of Bahrain. Technical Affairs Directorate [TAD], one of the directorates of SLRB, is responsible for providing vital property data, records, and land information to support any decision process related to property transactions. TAD is mandated to manage the historical maps having ownership information dating back from 1920s.
TAD was faced with multiple business challenges to match user & customer expectations prior to the use of geospatial and database technologies. In a challenging environment, TAD not only has to maintain the right ownership information but also
1. Carefully handle deteriorating paper maps,
2. Decipher the handwritten property transactions information on paper maps which spanned many decades,
3. Trace parcel history which has gone through many phases of subdivisions and consolidations in decades
With advancement and accessibility of geospatial & database technologies, each of TAD’s challenge found an efficient solution. With government keenness and higher management’s support to improve business processes, TAD started tackling challenges one by one with all solutions geared to one simple vision - safeguard sovereign and individual property ownership rights.
TAD commissioned an ever evolving geospatial project namely ‘Case File Application Project’ in early 2005 wherein
1. Digital cadastral maps used to create geospatial base platform; satellite images were added to enhance the ground truth.
2. All historical maps scanned, indexed and linked to geospatial platform.
3. Handwritten property information from paper maps were captured in database built on top of geospatial platform.
4. An application built to digitally record all future properties transactions including associated attributes.
5. Built-in quality module minimizes manual data entry and maximizes geospatial capabilities to fetch underlying data.
6. An advance search engine quickly retrieves related information to reduce time in property transactions.
7. Built-in reporting tool produces statistical and graphical reports to keep management informed of real time property transactions in Bahrain.
8. Application is available on SLRB intranet and has multilevel secured user access.
9. Scalable Application is supporting Bahrain’s Geospatial Data Infrastructure [BSDI]
Case File Application [CFA] Project has now become the backbone of TAD. Since the project implementation in 2005, all property transactions are recorded & retrieved in digital geospatial environment. Major benefits of CFA Projects are:
1. User confidence in recording/furnishing property transactions with ease.
2. Customer satisfaction in getting necessary information in matter of minutes which earlier took not less than a day and sometimes even weeks.
TAD is continually adding more dimensions in Case File Application Project to keep itself abreast of technology and user demands to ensure the Kingdom of Bahrain’s Guarantee of Title.
Ensuing paper will share how a government organization in Bahrain took simple yet futuristic steps to transform business processes which not only motivated its staff to work efficiently but made its customer happy too. Paper will cover few key factors of a successful working geospatial project.

A Review of Electronic Land Administration in Malaysia: Issues and Challenges (121)
Nor Shahriza Abdul Karim, International Islamic University Malaysia, Maidin Ainul Jariah, Mohd Shukri Ismail (Malaysia)

The development of information and communication technology (ICT) has changed significantly how government operates and manages its businesses. The interest for advanced ICT applications can be observed worldwide through various visions and efforts in the development of effective e-government services. In land administration, the urgency to move forward for sustainable development of land, has sparked the need for an electronically integrated land administration system (e-LAS). The Internet technology has the ability to transform the way the government and the private sectors in modern economies do business through an important land commodity, which is land information that are integrated and shared by all parties in land development and administration.
According to Williamson (2005) ICTs are highly important tools in support for sustainable development and effective and efficient land market. In his illustration of land administration vision, Williamson stressed on the importance of realizing the potential of land and cadastral information that are integrated and can be made available publicly over the Internet. Accordingly, while the concept of e-LAS has been long discussed by various agencies to accommodate Internet enabled e-government environment initiatives (FIG 2004); it is currently being replaced by iLand, a new vision for spatially enabled land information to facilitate effective delivery of services in land administration (Williamson, 2005). According to Kalantari et. al. (2005), LAS has evolved from a focus on core functions of regulating land and property development, land use controls, land taxation and disputes to an integrated land management paradigm designed to support sustainable development through spatially enabled land administration.
While such vision in integrated and spatially enabled environment with LAS is realizable in some part of the world, many countries are still acquiring better understanding of ICT applications within their LAS environments (Kalantari et.al. 2005). Many are also at the stage of making adjustment with local issues and concerns in order to o keep up with the fast growing technology advancement. Continuous efforts have been made, in Malaysia for instance, to benefit from the evolution in land administration system due to the need for efficient and effective service delivery to the public; to address challenges in the conventional method of LAS, and to keep up with the demand in the currently competitive land market. LAS in Malaysia have been made to move accordingly through computerisation and the development of electronic LAS, even though some administrative functions were still following the traditional method of land administration practices. Such efforts can be seen through the development and use of registration system called Computerized Land Registration System (CLRS), Computerised Revenue System (CRS or SPHT), e-Consent, and most recently the development of integrated electronic land administration system called e-Tanah.
With the coming of the technology, Malaysia needs to be well prepared for changes in its land administration system at all levels of its operations. Such changes, which are made available through massive investment in ICT, must take into consideration many issues and challenges to ensure the success of the migration processes. These issues and challenges may include aspects such as the institutional, human, legal, and technical factors that must be addressed profoundly by authorities at various levels in land administration. In setting the conditions for fully operational e-Government Ossko (2006) suggested the need for legal changes and new laws, fully operational IT systems, harmonization of databases, integration of different public databases, institutional awareness at all levels, and acceptance of the electronic systems, services and administration by the entire society.
Accordingly, this report will provide the analysis of the existing ICT applications in land administration system in Malaysia on the issues and challenges mentioned earlier, and suggest ways for which the country can better adopt and adapt the current and future electronic environment in LAS. Ultimately, the outcome of this analysis will also result in the recommendation of legal provisions that will support effective migration of LAS to fully operational electronic environment.

Data Sharing Issues in SDI Implementation at National Land Administration for Country Multi-Government (31)
Halim Hamzah, Spatial and Numerical Modelling Laboratory, Institute of Advance Technology, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Abdul Rashid Mohamed Shariff, Ahmad Rodzi Mahmud, Nik Mohd Zain Nik Yusof, Hishamuddin Mohd Ali (Malaysia)

Land administration started with a manual land tax collection and toward to computerized system in contact to improve the Land Information Delivery Services (LIDS). Several activities in land administration (example land surveying, land registration and land information database) are based on land tenures, land values and land use need to move from spatial data infrastructure (SDI) 1st Generation (Product Based Model) to SDI 2nd Generation (Process Based Model). However, the data sharing issues especially related on LIDS among national land administration stakeholders must give priority especially for country have multi-government (Federal, State and Local Government). These issues involve several topics in non-technical integration such as integration legal provisions and land law practices among government institutional; structure and cultural human resources management; and governance & cross-government collaboration model. Using qualitative method with in-depth case study (interview, observation and questionnaire form) can identify and analysis several issues in LIDS with SDI implementation especially related non-technical integration. The targeted respondents among several officer involve on LIDS with SDI implementation in three main elements of land administration stakeholders (land use, land value and land ownership). The findings from this research would be able to come out with a better solution currently faced by decision maker. A new guideline would then be proposed to help a more effective administrative process to identify the implementation of strategic management for LIDS need to adjustment or changing or remove from strategic plan in contact to improve and toward spatial enabling government. This research will be useful in land administration and development field such as land administrator or land officer (Federal, State and Local Government); land decision makers (town planning, land valuer or land investor); and real estate researcher.


Parallel Session 6.3 (Room 304)
Business and Government Roles in Building and Maintaining SDI

Utilising New Technology to Automate the Data Processing Cycle of Continental Datasets (21)
Dan Paull, PSMA Australia (Australia), Duncan Guthrie (UK)

PSMA Australia is a government’s owned company that was established to coordinate the assembly of, and facilitate access to, fundamental continental datasets. The delivery of these datasets requires the management of a complex data supply chain that includes the management of many Data Contributors and Value Added Resellers. Through more than a decade of operation of this supply chain, PSMA Australia recognised that it was a strategic imperative to streamline the data processing cycle. This data processing cycle has historically relied on diverse externally contracted processes with human intervention. It was recognised that a generic data management environment that could automate dataset standardisation and conflation, independent of data type or structure, and reduce the time taken to process data, would dramatically change the way continental datasets were developed.
This paper will discuss how PSMA Australia:
- Developed key international relationships to ensure the best software and support system was used for the project;
- Recognised that data automation was a core component in the future of data management, and therefore realised it was necessary to undertake this process;
- Developed a Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) and Orchestration for Spatial Data Management;
- Implemented generic and flexible Web-Services architecture that allowed for the re-used of services to build new processes that could be applied anywhere in the supply chain ; and
- Took a lead position within Australia, to undertake a project that had not previously been seen within the Australian and International Spatial Information community.
This innovative approach to managing continental datasets also enables the use of services and processes by third parties (Data Contributors and Value Added Resellers), thus broadening the application of a functioning Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) within the Australian context.
A key aspect to the flexibility of the system and its ability to rapidly adapt to new datasets and data types is the novel and groundbreaking use of the 1Spatial Radius Studio software. While Radius Studio performs as a service within a generic orchestrated web-service process, the rule set that it uses enables that process to be specifically tailored to suit the data input type and output requirements especially in combination with FME Server. The approach has already yielded significant improvements in efficiency and is expected to rapidly improve the rate at which data products can be developed and updated within the context of continental datasets.

The Digital Earth Vision
Milan Konecny, Masaryk University, Brno (Czech Republic)

The Digital Earth (DE) vision is entering a second decade. As is well known its designer was american professor (and later Nobel award winner) vice-president Al Gore who formulated it in 1998 after the success of the US NSDI idea started by President Clinton. The International Society for Digital Earth (ISDE) was inaugurated in May 2006 as a non-political, non-governmental and not-for-profit international organization initiated by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) with the collaboration of institutes and related scholars throughout the world. Al Gore focused mainly on a technological approach which was visible especially in USA. The vision subsequently expanded to cover wider issues surrounding sustainable development (ecology, economy, social, cultural, ethical) as announced at the first Digital Earth conference held in Beijing on November 29-December 2, 1999. Many world famous scientists further developed the DE idea as world politics ebbed and flowed in support of the vision. Over the years further terminology such as virtual and cyber have gained some traction and new excellent tools such a Google Earth have emerged. But even with the newest approaches we are still unable to meet the expectations of decision makers and especially the idea of data integration is far from meeting its potential. This is readily apparent each year as we witness responses to disasters whether widespread distruction (Australian, Greeks and Russian fires) or local and regional disasters caused by failure to investigate new type of floods - flash ones (Czech Republic, Poland) in which people perished. Experts are trying to find new approaches and create new environments in which it will be easier to use technological products in appropriate ways for disaster situation solutions. It is one of many reasons why also in Europe scientists started to investigate, evaluate and plan to use the Digital Earth idea as one of the unique concepts in which infrastructure can support creation of synergy between society and technologies. The idea is to serve both specialists and everyday people in responding to risky situations.

The author of the paper is giving overview of contemporary development concepts of Digital Earth vision on the backgroud of  meetings in JRC, Ispra Italy  and Digital Earth summit in Nessebar, Bulgaria, which were held earlier this year. Also  new ideas especially in the use of the DE vision in improvement of activities in crises management situations are add.

Introducing the D_City (Data Cities) Global Technology Network (155)
Davina Jackson, DCity (Australia)

Clause 11 of the 2009 Copenhagen Accord commits the signatory nations to delivering a 'technology mechanism' to accelerate solutions for climate change.
One large contribution to that mechanism is the emerging d_city (data cities) technology network to accelerate climate change solutions in urban planning and development. Its first proposed project is a global series of case studies towards online planning for eco cities -- using data about natural environmental systems to inform the masterplanning of large new urban developments.
Australian writer Davina Jackson has been 'catalysing' the d_city network for several years -- expanding her knowledge from advanced digital architecture (as editor of Architecture Australia in the 1990s) to the next wave of aerospatial technologies being increasingly applied to the challenges of urban development.
Davina is now developing the d_city technology network as a member of the steering committee for UN-HABITAT's World Urban Campaign.

Land Registration and Cadastre in Iran (985)
Hamid Berenjkar, Head of Cadastre Project Research and Planning Affairs (Iran)

The role of cadastral data in establishment of National Spatial Data Infrastructures (NSDI's) is quite significant. The cadastral information layer cannot  be replaced by a different spatial information layer derived from geographic information systems (GIS).  The unique cadastral capacity is to identify a parcel of land both on the ground and in the system in terms that all stakeholders can relate to, typically an address plus a systematically generated identifier. The core cadastral information of parcels, properties and buildings, and in many cases legal roads, thus becomes the core of SDI information, feeding into utility infrastructure, hydrological, vegetation, topographical, images, and dozens of other datasets.
To achieve the aforesaid goals and for Raising the accuracy of land information, completing comprehensive land property databank, updating existence information, preventing forgeries and blurs in issued land titles, obtaining satisfaction of clients, rendering of optimum services to all citizens with high quality, precision, and speed, and For modernization of Registration, "Iran's Cadastre Project", officially started working under Iran’s Deeds and Properties Registration Organization.
Now this project has progressed and prepared a lot of digital cadastral maps, and a powerful data base. To prepare digital cadastre database (DCDB), more than 60 percent of urban area has been covered by digital cadastre map which consisting of 60,000 map sheet with scale of 1:500 and legal attributes of more than 24 million registered parcels have been converted to digital database. For other areas (rural, agricultural …), the collection of data is done by interoperability with other related organizations in a unique standard, to have a comprehensive cadastral dataset for the whole country.


Invited Paper: Title Forthcoming (906)
Kyoung-Soo Eom, Chief UN Cartographic Section

forthcoming


Parallel Session 6.4 (Room 305)
SDI Legal and Economic Issues

Borrowing from the BBC: Can the Public-Value Test be Applied to Spatial Data Services? (17)
Katleen Janssen, Interdisciplinary Center for Law and ICT, K.U.Leuven, Joep Crompvoets, Karen Donders (Belgium)

The role of the public sector in the provision of spatial data services is increasingly being questioned. Which added-value services should the public sector provide for the benefit of the citizens, and which activities should it leave to the private sector? Is a public body competing unfairly with the private sector if it provides added-value services on the market?
The spatial data community is not the only sector struggling with the issue of defining the public task or the remit of the public sector data providers. Another sector that has been dealing with the same questions for a long time, is public broadcasting. In this sector, one of the processes that has been proposed to determine whether a public body is performing a public task or not, is the so-called public value test. This test is applied to determine whether a particular broadcasting activity planned by the BBC is part of its public remit, or should be considered outside the scope of this remit. This process involves an assessment of the public value of the new service that is proposed on the one hand, and an assessment of the effect of this new service on the market on the other hand. Both assessments are put to a public consultation, after which a final decision is taken, in about six months from the start of the procedure. In the broadcasting sector, the public value test seems to provide a flexible procedure to decide on the scope of the public task for a concrete case.
Can this test be applied or adapted to the domain of public sector spatial data, in order to raise the discussion on the public task to a next level? This presentation will look at the concept of the public value test from the point of view of the spatial data sector and try to determine the pros and cons of using this approach to determine the public task nature of the provision of spatial information services by the public sector.

Legal Interoperability in Support of Spatially Enabling Society (907)
Harlan Onsrud, Spatial Information Science and Engineering, University of Maine (USA)

Spatial data is critically important for the wellbeing of society. Yet appropriate spatial data is often very difficult to find and, when found, the legal ability to use it is often in question. Lack of an operational web-wide capability allowing users to legally access and use the geospatial data of others without seeking permission on a case-by-case basis remains as an entrenched major impediment to general spatial enablement for all sectors in society. This chapter presents a legal interoperability vision for offering, acquiring, and using spatial data and proposes an operational environment for gaining much greater legal clarity and efficiency in wide scale sharing and licensing of such data.

User Generated Legal Issues (909)
Jennifer Chandler, Facutly of Law, University of Ottawa (Canada)

The creation and broad dissemination of user generated content (UGC) is a central feature of Web 2.0.  It has led to an explosion of remarkable joint creations and enhanced public political participation, as well as to a torrent of low quality content or harmful misinformation and interaction.  The law is centrally important both in fostering the positive and dealing with the negative aspects of UGC.  Among the legal questions posed by UGC is the division of legal responsibility between users and facilitating sites (Wikipedia, Google Maps, etc.) for problematic content, as well as what can be expected of reasonable consumers of UGC.  This paper will review the legal responses to copyright infringement, defamation, and misrepresentation in the UGC content and will consider how the law might respond to geographical UGC.

Spatial Information and Government (900)
Liz Marchant, Executive Director ANZLIC (Australia)

Spatial information is an invaluable tool for Government 2.0 for delivering the right services to the right citizens at the right time. Spatial information allows policy makers and operational managers in government agencies to visualise where their policies and programs should be targeted and also why. It is also important to ensure that delivery of those policies and services go to the people that need them. Spatial information should be made available to all levels of government be they federal, state or local and the presentation will show how ANZLIC – the Spatial Information is developing policies, frameworks and guidelines to enable that  information sharing.


Parallel Session 6.5 (Room 306)
Arctic SDIs

The Arctic SDI, a joint circumpolar initiative (22)
Martin Skedsmo, Norwegian Mapping Authority (Norway)

The Arctic SDI will be the worlds first circumpolar mapservice, with background maps from the 8 arctic countries. It is a cooperation with working groups of the Arctic Councils, with support from the Arctic Council itself.

GITBarents (58)
Owe Palmer, Mapping Agency of Sweden (Sweden)

The GITBarents WMS covers an area larger than the combined areas of Portugal, Spain, France, Italy and Germany – at the scales of 1:1, 1:3 and 1:12 millions, built from existing national databases. It will now be used as a platform in an Arctic SDI

Unconfirmed
xxxx


Parallel Session 7.1 (Theater)
Spatial Enablement

The Pioneering Relationship between PSMA Australia and EuroGeographics: How these Continental Mapping Agencies are Enabling the Spatial Community (20)
Dan Paull, PSMA Australia (Australia), Dave Lovell, Secretary General, EuroGeographics (France)

PSMA Australia is an unlisted public company that is owned by the governments of Australia. It was established as a company in 2001 to coordinate the assembly of, and facilitate access to, fundamental continental datasets.
EuroGeographics is a body that was established in 2000 to represent Europe’s National Mapping and Cadastral Agencies. It was established to facilitate collaboration between participating countries of Europe, and to develop pan-European datasets.
This paper will discuss the similarities between PSMA Australia and EuroGeographics and describe how INSPIRE, ESDIN and the LYNX Redevelopment Programme provide the ingredients for International Cooperation and SDI development. It will also examine how these initiatives are enabling domestic and international spatial communities, and are providing benefits from the establishment of this strategic relationship.
This paper will explore the pioneering relationship between PSMA Australia and EuroGeographics by:
- Examining the similarities between business models and governance structures;
- Discussing the process required for the development of Continental datasets involving multiple governments;
- Discussing how both organisations are involved in global initiatives to further spatial data community activities; and
- Exploring the development of an international collaboration to further development in the areas of data standardisation and integration and development of SDI.
The relationship between PSMA Australia and EuroGeographics is strategic and previously unseen within the global geo-spatial community. It provides a linkage, between two organisations, to the government agencies responsible for spatial data across two continents. The benefits that will be obtained by both the Australian and European spatial communities which they serve are significant, and will be positively influenced by this relationship.
The collaboration between EuroGeographics and PSMA Australia breaks new and important ground for both organisations. Whilst it is at an early stage, it is clear that the relationship has huge potential to deliver in areas such as organisational development and in research into, and development of, spatial data infrastructures. This relationship, between organisations with continental responsibilities around spatial information, may very well signal a new era of collaboration and cooperation internationally and could lead to a practical and pragmatic approach to building a Global Spatial Data Infrastructure.

Realizing Spatially Enabled Societies: What About the Developing Nations of Asia-Pacific? (135)
Greg Scott, Geoscience Australia (Australia)

The Asia-Pacific region experiences some of the world’s worst natural hazards with frequent earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, cyclones, floods, landslides and annual monsoons. It also represents 60% of the world’s population, a huge geographic area with diverse levels of economic and social development, and includes many of the world’s megacities. In recent times the largest increases in population in the region have occurred in the coastal zones and/or poorest areas, where people are most vulnerable and the impact of natural disasters is greatest.
Much has been achieved in applying geo-information to disaster response, especially in using imagery and fundamental spatial data to “record” what disasters took place and what areas were affected. However, these achievements are variable, reactive, often uncoordinated and not to appropriate standards and/or practices. Further, the ability to apply geo-information technologies to disaster mitigation and reduction before events happen has been limited due to a lack of capacity and capability’ particularly within many developing member nations.
The 18th UNRCC-AP recognized the benefits of having access to data in time of disaster for assessment and relief, but also the ongoing difficulties of many member nations in accessing all forms of spatial data, such as GIS, remote sensing and land administration for disaster management. The conference also recognized the importance of the integration of fundamental data with other spatial data, including hazard and exposure data sets in support of disaster mitigation and reduction, the power of spatial tools in integrating various data from many sources and multiple formats, and that the discovery, access, integration and delivery of geospatial data can become much easier with enhanced interoperability.
With the understanding that PCGIAP is about building capacity and capability in the Asia-Pacific region, PCGIAP WG3: Spatially Enabled Government and Society is undertaking a number of activities that demonstrate efforts being made by developing nations to improve access to data so as to support disaster management in a number of ways, including capturing timely data to support regional hazard assessment, and enable member states to understand and pursue the principles of data integration within the context of realising spatially enabled societies.

Spatially Enabled E-Government in The Netherlands: The Adventurous Path to Success by Working Together (49)
Martin A. Salzmann, Cadastre, Land Registry and Mapping Agency, Caroline J. Groot (The Netherlands)

Traditionally the Netherlands have known a well developed Spatial Data Infrastructure in terms of operational key-registers digital availability of data. The demand side has traditionally been less developed. Public agencies involved in geo-information in the Netherlands have taken the step to cooperate at all levels (operational to strategic) in order to serve the public sector, citizens and businesses in an integrated way. We have experienced that this primarily requires a shift in the cultural sense: not the position of each agency is the starting point, but the sharing of each other’s data, knowledge, services and users. In this contribution we will focus on the lessons we have learned in this adventurous process considering that we are dealing with sometimes century old institutions. The lessons are placed in an international context.
Starting point was the decision to work together to build a SDI based on de European directive INSPIRE. INSPIRE forces us to improve our supply channels and stimulates us to share our data. During this process these organisations discovered that there were more benefits possible by working together than cost reduction alone. The infrastructure could also be very useful for solving business problems in their own organisations, the public sector at large (fulfilling the Dutch government objective to create a smaller and better government), citizens and businesses.
In 2009 we therefore started with a four year program ‘Public Services with Digital Maps’. Our goal is to realise a robust national spatial information infrastructure. Not only to fulfil the INSPIRE objectives but also to open all major public geo-data and spatial services to society at large. In our contribution we will focus on a number of issues that we have faced:
- The decision which parties can use the data and infrastructure;
- Under which conditions data can be used and shared (harmonizing terms of delivery and pricing models);
- The difficulty of having a sound business case for the parties involved (on a national level the benefits are evident, but at the organisation level the cost versus the benefits often do not match;
- Setting up services on top of the basic data sets and data services considering customer demands, organisational consequences;
- Compliance with the Inspire directive and the Netherlands’ e-government interoperability framework;
- The international context of the project.
- The change management at the various public agencies.
The upcoming year we will need to tackle this so that by 2013 there will be a geo-information pool where all relevant national public geo-datasets (Inspire and others) will be opened up for public and private use.

Spatially Enabling Isfahan Metropolis through Local SDI (93)
Esmaeil Adili, Deputy of planning, research, information and communication technology, Isfahan municipality, Abolghasem Golestannejad, Vahid Heidarian, Maryam Amini, Morteza Sadeghi (Islamic Republic Of Iran)

Accessing the reliable, seamless, accurate and up-to-date spatial information regarding geographic features, lands and properties, utilities (such as roads, water and sewage, power and telecommunication), land uses, businesses and other activities in urban society plays a critical role in enabling this society to provide citizens with appropriate and sustainable services.
In this regards the municipality of Isfahan, as one of the major cities located in the centre of Iran, has been recently developed a Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) with the aim of facilitating the spatially enabling Isfahan. SDI is a concept for facilitating and coordinating the sharing and integrating of data through different political and administrative levels. SDI can be developed at different levels ranging from local to state/provincial, national, regional and global.
As a result, improving the efficiency and effectiveness of services to the citizens, providing the urban decision makers with more accessible, accurate and reliable spatial data, establishing a comprehensive framework for data management, developing the availability and accessibility of spatial information for users and encouraging them to cooperate in urban management and planning have been considered as the objectives of Isfahan SDI. The implementation of Isfahan SDI, as a fundamental stage in geospatial strategic plan of Isfahan municipality, has been started in 2009 and is an ongoing project.
This paper aims to explore the Isfahan SDI platform roadmap, characteristics and also related activities and achievements so far. In addition, the paper will discuss the role of the SDI in spatially enabling the Isfahan society and further research activities.


Parallel Session 7.2 (Room 303)
SDI Applications: Hazards

Virtual Emergency Control Centers (18)
Jan Wandek, National Safety Agency (Australia)

Australia’s 2009 bush/wild fires were the worst in the nation’s history. They helped accelerate a special research program by Australia’s National Safety Agency (NSA) to develop a new system of coordinated control and communication to handle such emergencies over a wide area and using Spatial Infromation.
Major disasters and incidents are reoccurring with greater frequency and increasing devastation around the world. At present, most of the systems used to handle such events are largely uncoordinated and rely on manual procedures. The NSA program is focused on developing a web-based spatial solution which can be applied to any major disaster or incident where organisations and groups of people have to cooperate to deal with the problem and manage the recovery process.
Cooperative research and trials in Australia and Canada have created a unique solution plus spatial Data with the potential for use anywhere in the world, and by international organisations such as the United Nations. The Integrated Mobile Command (IMC) system is designed to handle major emergencies and events over a wide area requiring interoperability among emergency agencies and emergency centres sharing both spatial and operational information. This security classified solution lays the foundation for ongoing spatial research and development.
In conjunction with personnel from the Ontario Ministry of Health in Canada, the IMC system is currently being prepared for operational trials at the G8 and G20 Summit meetings in Canada in June 2010. The solution provides a coordinating umbrella over all the communications and spatial solutions used to protect international leaders participating in both Summits.
The presentation by the principal researcher will cover the situation leading up to the Australian fires in 2009, the fires themselves, impacts on the people affected, the foundations and application of the solution and its spatial use at the G8 and G20 Summits and in future bush/wildfires.
Jan Wandek is the Interoperability Advisor to the National Safety Agency of Australia, a not-for-profit research centre. His area of expertise is in designing and developing systems to achieve multi-agency interoperability within and between wide-area emergency coordination centres. He is a member of the Centre for SDI and Land Administration Advisory Committee with the University of Melbourne, actively works and cooperates with the University’s Department of Geomatics, is the originator of Latitude, an Australian developed GIS Mapping Solution used by local government authorities in Australia and is Deputy Chair of the Victoria Branch of the Spatial Industries Business Association (Australia). Jan is also a Fellow Certified Practicing Accountant (FCPA) and holds a Fellowship Diploma of Information Technology with the RMIT University,

United Nations Platform for Space-based Information for Disaster Management and Emergency Response (UN-SPIDER) (910)
Lóránt Czárán, (UN New York, USA)

forthcoming

Estimating Population Exposed to Cyclone Storm Surge (102)
Gregory Yetman, CIESIN, Columbia University, Yuri Gorokhovich (USA), Ceyhun Ozcelik (Japan)

Estimates of population exposed to coastal storm surge due to cyclones are important for disaster management and mitigation. This paper describes a web-based system that allows users to submit a cyclone track (predicted or historical) with wind and pressure information for analysis. The model uses the relation of wind and pressure to storm surge to compute a variable surge height, depending on the distance from the hurricane track. The track can cross or approach the coastline. The variable surge height data are intersected with SRTM-derived elevations to map areas of potential impact from storm surge. Global Rural-Urban Mapping Project (GRUMP) population data are used to estimate the residential population in the area of impact. A map of the area impacted and estimates of population are provided to the user. The paper gives an overview of the model, including the GIS analysis used to estimate the area impacted and population exposed.

Integrating Spatial Planning and Disaster Risk Reduction at the Local Level in the Context of Spatially Enable Government (80)
Heri Sutanta, Center for SDIs and Land Administration, University of Melbourne, Abbas Rajabifard, Bishop Ian (Australia)

Spatial planning is increasingly regarded as one of the important instrument in disaster risk reduction. It facilitates decision on the future use of space in any administrative unit, which in some cases may be confronted by natural hazards. This would be an important component of any society and government if they want to become spatially enabled. This chapter discusses theoretical approach in integrating disaster risk reduction into spatial planning at the local government level. Attention is focused on the local government level because at this level mainly the operational aspect of spatial planning is executed. Prerequisites for proper integration are elaborated. A method for the integration based on integrated risk map and vulnerability map is proposed. It also shows example of how the local government in Indonesia tried to incorporate disaster risk reduction in the spatial planning. Four aspects of policy and regulation, organizational aspect, data consideration and platform for integration were assessed.


Parallel Session 7.3 (Room 304)
Participatory Initiatives

Facilitating Volunteered Geographic Information Through SDI Policy Frameworks
Kevin McDougall, University of Southern Queensland (Australia) (109)

Although the momentum for the application and integration of volunteered geographic information continues to grow, the institutional inertia within government environments has yet to empower the users to participate as partners in future SDI development. This paper will review current SDI policy frameworks and trace the developments that have occurred in recent years, particularly the progressive move from top down national approaches towards the bottom up SDI developments. Existing policy frameworks vary significantly in their attitude towards the user, although a primary purpose of SDI is to facilitate the access to spatial data for potential users and the wider community. The conditions required to both facilitate and inhibit volunteered spatial information will be explored and a comparative analysis against existing policy frameworks will be undertaken. In particular, the heavy reliance of volunteered geographic information on a suitable information access framework and the ability of existing SDIs to incorporate user generated information within their data models will be examined. The conditions that facilitate collaboration for the sharing of data within a business environment such as trust, sharing of benefits, a shared value of the data and clear partner responsibilities also exist within the volunteered geographic information environment. These conditions will be explored in the context of a user and a SDI custodian agency. Changes to existing policy frameworks that are more sympathetic to user driven approaches will be presented and their possible implication discussed.

Potential of VGI as a Resource for SDIs in the North/South Context (42)
Stéphane Roche, Université Laval, Elisabetta Genovese (Canada)

New on-line services that support user-generated and user-modified maps are emerging at a rapid pace and a vast amount of information has been created. Anyone with Internet access via computer or mobile devices now has the ability to display geospatial data and voluntarily add information without the help of a GIS expert. This user-created geospatial content has been named Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) by Goodchild (2007a).
The concept and its implementation present a combination of potential and risks, which now must be considered. This study aims primarily at detecting, and presenting schematically, the strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats of VGI as a resource for Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) in the North and South contexts. We explore how the integration of VGI with official information can be a powerful source of novel data that can be included in SDIs. We analyse the VGI potential in developing countries, especially in areas where reliable spatial data is scarce and the digital divide is more delineated. We suggest that the use of VGI technology can be capitalised upon by building SDIs, and we conclude with a number of suggestions for further research.

Achieving the Health Millennium Developing Goals in Developing Countries Using GIS Knowledge Networks: Case of Mozambique (107)
Zeferino Benjamim Saugene, University of Oslo (Norway)

Maternal Health has been a top priority in the last years for the government of Mozambique. Analysing the WHO report on Child and Maternal Health inequality in Mozambique (January 2007), a number of factors have been identified as potential causes of obtaining lower maternal mortality rates.
Researchers have been advising the use of technologies to improve maternal health outcomes as well as generate cost savings within the health systems of developing countries. For example, to achieve the goal of maternal mortality reduction, as encapsulated within the Millennium Development Goals, the collection, analysis, and use of geographic information as it relates to the multidimensionality of maternal mortality offers a starting point. The use of GIS is important in maternal health mapping for its data integration capability. The potential of GIS lies in its ability to generate spatial variables such as distance measurement with proximity analysis (for example, distance to nearest health facility; overlay analysis), in seeking to understand the association between service use and population density.
A study by Medicus Mundi Catalunya on maternal health, in Gaza province (Mozambique), has revealed that the health sector needs to adopt different approaches to understand maternal health issues. For instance, in order to improve maternal health the focus must be primarily on improving coverage and quality of antenatal care by reducing barriers to accessing health services. Studies have highlighted that number of socio-economic factors such as education, wealth, occupation, access to information and area of residence were critical in understanding the maternal mortality issue. Thus, addressing these issues requires a stronger multi-sectoral approach, in particular, a joint effort with other government and non-government institutions.
Efforts have been articulated by different institutions in Mozambique to collect spatial data. However, this has been most of the times in isolated manner. Work done by the author found that some of the main reasons that hamper the spatial data sharing is related to intellectual property as well as GIS stakeholders skills.
As the maternal health issues are universal, Mozambique can learn from other countries’ strategies used to forward this issue, to successfully learn from these countries there is a need to create partnerships (communities) aiming at sharing knowledge/experience in a proper way. Strategic partnerships within the GIS sector create the environment for cooperation. Activities intended to increase the knowledge base such as applied research under knowledge sharing circumstances have a high potential for building capacity among partners. It is crucial that all GIS stakeholders be involved in these networks for capacity development, and that there is a high level of commitment of related institutions to successfully implement shared activities. Knowledge management tools such as Communities of Practice and learning networks are important elements to support capacity development activities.
In attempting to contribute to a better understanding of maternal health, this paper aims to present an approach that can be used to make GIS useful to the institutions dealing with maternal health in Mozambique. In spite of the various types of building blocks required to successfully create, operate and maintain knowledge networks, Communities of Practice is presented in this paper as the main building block that can be used to forward maternal health issues. In conclusion, the paper points out the critical success factors and the strategy for ensuring that the use of GIS is feasible in developing countries with minimal resources and a scarcity of GIS professionals, such as Mozambique.

Training in Web 2.0 Tools: Bringing Spatial Data Infrastructures to People
Mabel Alvarez, Universidad Nacional de la Patagonia San Juan Bosco (Argentina), Domingo Gallego Gil, Marta Isabel Dans, Zulema Beatriz Rosanigo,Karina Cela, Jorge Valdivia Guzmán, Nibaldo Gatica Zapata, Lara Anabel López Alvarez

The fast evolution of the Internet and the Information and Communication Technologies is highly superior to the ability of the people to get used to it and to understand it.
Many people, such as professionals, technicians and members of the society in general, may have a very valuable knowledge, but it remains hidden. The use of the Internet and the Web 2.0 tools is still an obstacle.
To think about the Internet as a tool for seeking information, but not as a Web 2.0 environment with interaction, is a handicap of many people.
This situation can be seen in many environments, including the Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) and related issues, taking into account the fact that the whole society is participating in the SDI when it is considered in a wide sense.
Therefore, the situation mentioned above was considered to develop a Project, including researchers from: Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) from  Spain,  the Universidad Nacional de la Patagonia San Juan Bosco (UNPSJB) from Argentina, the Universidad de Concepción (UdC) from Chile and the Escuela Politécnica del Ejército (ESPE) from Ecuador. This Project is titled: “Training and Knowledge Management with Web 2.0 tools for University Teaching, Administrative and Educative Management and Continuing Professional Developement in Argentina, Chile and Ecuador” . This project is currently in the implementation phase.
The paper has five sections. The first one describes the identified problem. The second one, the lines of action of the project. The third one, the project’s general tasks and, particularly, the training program using online courses and video-conferences (these ones mainly oriented to SDI). The fourth one, the specific characteristics of those tasks and the results obtained until the present, and the fifth and last one is centered in some final considerations about the current project.


Parallel Session 7.4 (Room 305)
Standards and Interoperability

The Uptake of SDI Components in Business Processes: the Case of the Elaboration of Spatial Execution Plans in Flanders (Belgium) (142)
Danny Vandenbroucke, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Jos Van Orshoven (Belgium)

Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) consist of combinations of technological and non-technological components, also called set-ups, which aim to improve the access, use and exchange of spatial data (Masser 1999, Rajabifard 2003). Technological components are, amongst others, data sets, their metadata, tools and network services. Standards are making the different components work together, i.e. they make them interoperable. Non-technological components can cover legal, economic, organizational and inter-organizational aspects: e.g. agreements, licensing and funding mechanisms, and coordinating structures. SDIs are expected not only to enhance the use of geospatial data, they also aim at improving the business processes in which they are used.
In reality however, there is very little knowledge about the uptake of components of existing SDIs, and the way these components are applied (or used) and combined within real business processes (Reed 2004, Vandenbroucke 2008). Even less is known on how the integration of the components has an impact (or not) on the processes themselves and on their outcomes. In the research project SPATIALIST – SDI and Public Sector Information – this uptake and impact is analyzed in different policy decision and service delivery processes. This paper looks into the different aspects related to the uptake of geo-standards in such processes. The geo-standards studied relate to data specifications and metadata, and to access mechanisms and exchange formats.
We analyze for one particular business process, i.e. the elaboration of spatial execution plans in the policy field of spatial planning of the Flemish Government (Belgium), which geo-standards are applied by whom, and why certain standards are applied while others are not. Through interviews amongst six organizations, the information on different technological set-ups is collected, as well as the data flows that occur within and between these and other organizations involved in the process. The Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is used to describe the set-ups and the different steps in the process, together with their corresponding data flows. This graphical representation helps to better understand the encountered impedances that hamper those data flows. This analysis is a first step to better understand how the application (or not) of certain standards influence the efficiency and effectiveness of the data flows, and ultimately the business process itself. The objective is to extent the analysis in the future with a more extensive method for measuring the performance of different SDI set-ups.
References
Masser I, 1999. All shapes and sizes: The first generation of national spatial data infrastructures. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 13: 67–84
Rajabifard A, Feeney M F, and Williamson I, 2003. Spatial Data Infrastructures: Concept, nature and SDI hierarchy. In Williamson I, Rajabifard A, and Feeney M F (eds) Developing Spatial Data Infrastructures: From Concept to Reality. Boca Raton, FL, CRC Press: 17–40
Reed C, 2004. Integrating Geospatial Standards and Standards Strategies into Business Process, Open Geospatial Consortium
Vandenbroucke D, Bamps C, Janssen K, Longhorn R, and Tirry D, 2007. The Geographical Information Sector in Catalunya: Strategic Study to Support the Cartographic Plan of Catalunya. unpublished report, Leuven, Belgium

Elaboration of National Standards for Geospatial Information Management. A Contribution to the Development of the Chilean SDI (145)
Alvaro Monett, Ministry of National Assets, María Loreto Advis, María Viviana Barrientos (Chile)

The National System for Territorial Information Coordination (SNIT) is the name given to the National Geospatial Data Infrastructure in Chile, as established by Supreme Decree of the Ministry of National Assets. One of the key goals of SNIT is to facilitate access and use of geospatial information generated by national bodies to support decision making in public policy, land use planning, economic development and environmental sustainability, among others.
In this context, the work of the SNIT is aimed at promoting collaborative management of geospatial information generated by different institutions, each one of them providing the matters that are particular to the sector, achieving together an integrated view of reality that involves a high added value for spatial analysis and the decisions it supports. For this, it is essential that the information provided by each of the agencies comply with requirements to ensure interoperability.
From the above, is underway since December 29, 2009 a project to generate Chilean standards related to geospatial information management, based on international standards developed by the Technical Committee 211 of the International Organization Standards (ISO TC 211). The execution period is 36 months and funding was obtained from INNOVA Chile, CORFO.
This is a associative project which is in charge of the National Standardization Institute of Chile (INN), where the Ministry of National Properties, represented by the Executive Secretariat of the SNIT, acts as a coordinator, attended by a group of institutions as partners: Geographic Military Institute (IGM), Aerophotogrametric Service of the Air Force (SAF), Hydrographic and Oceanographic Service of the Navy (SHOA), Information Center for Natural Resources (CIREN), Ministry of Public Works (MOP), the Chilean Space Agency (ACE) and National Service of Geology and Mining (SERNAGEOMIN).
The project will generate as a result 19 Chilean standards corresponding to ISO 19100 family, following the standardized process established by INN, for the development of each one of them. Within this, it is considered a public consultation period, so that experts can submit comments about each standard. Thus, Executive Secretariat of the SNIT has invited more than 200 specialists in geomatics -from public, private and academic sectors- to be part of the process.
In addition, as a result of the project it is included the development of guidance on the implementation of the 19 national standards in the management of geospatial information. The idea is to have a didactic document providing tools and knowledge in order to use these standards in the daily work with this type of information. Similarly, the project will finance an initial training by international experts in this family of standards and seminars for dissemination of results in several regions of the country.

Amazon Web Services and Cloud Computing Applied within the Geospatial Industry
Kingsley Wood, Amazon Asia-Pacific Resources Pvt. Ltd. (Singapore)

In this talk, Kingsley Wood will introduce the basic concepts of Cloud Computing, explain specific details of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform, and then provide examples of GIS applications running on AWS. Cloud Computing represents a game-changing opportunity to leverage compute, storage and distribution capacity previously reserved for large enterprises. The talk will end with conclusions and take aways, including business considerations, and a brief question and answer session.

Evolvable Information Architectures - A Model Driven Approach to Spatial Data Infrastructures (147)
Rob Atkinson, CSIRO Land and Water, Paul Box, David Lemon (Australia)

Information infrastructures evolve out of the need to form interconnected systems of systems to address issues that span the geographical, jurisdiction or subject domains, typically from an existing installed base of operational systems. Each of these existing systems comprises information and other components that are designed, built, owned and operated by different organisations. This presents a range of information interoperability and attendant governance challenges. Point-to-point integration is not scalable, and does little to help design systems that can be better integrated. A common, scalable approach to integration in turn requires infrastructure to support the interconnection agreements and implementation.
A significant challenge is that different aspects of these individual systems need to evolve and, more importantly, evolve independently of each other as new data sources, new data models, new technologies and new user requirements for products, services and applications emerge. Unfortunately, traditional information systems, built to serve a single mandate or project scope, do not readily evolve without major investment and risk. For example, it is often the case that stand-alone information systems rely on local copies of feature identifiers and semantic terms. As soon as a decision is made in the context of a system to, for example, merge, split or add new terms the local system semantics diverges from the original state of the external world at the time the original copy was made. Thus any intended interoperability of content decays over time as the system and the external world evolve separately.
Rather than trying to keep one monolithic system up to date with all changes in requirements, it is better to evolve the overall system by focusing on approaches that connect existing systems together as needed.
Common information models and common semantics enable the integration of data from multiple sources to meet the needs of a community. Often within an information community there are a number of information modelling initiatives. Within each of these initiatives, different aspects of systems are modelled including data, metadata, services and applications. Many of these modelling efforts need to use or reference concepts that are common across different subject domains but which have different behaviours in specific applications. For example, in different applications, rivers may be perceived and treated as barriers to road transport, enablers of water transport, vectors for transmission of disease, and part of a water supply system. As river features designed for one purpose may not be suitable for other purposes, a number of different representations of rivers need to exist. Features from one representation need to be associated with features from another, so that the different viewpoints can be integrated. This Integration requires a structural and semantic transformation from the original data source information models to a common target information model. In an infrastructure, the information models of available data sources and common information models become critical resources to enable understanding of existing integrations and to develop and record new ones.
This paper discusses the need for evolvable information architectures and articulates an approach to their design and maintenance that enables the development of interoperable information systems that together comprise information infrastructures. Specifically, the paper describes a model management framework that enables the integration of multiple related, but separately developed domain models and systems. It is proposed that such information models, coupled with semantic resources, enable the use of formal data product specifications to define, configure and access information products to meet evolving user requirements. A key element of the framework is a set of tools that support the development of models, the reverse-engineering of existing data into standard model formats (based on ISO and OGC standards) and the mapping and management of relationships between models. The model management tools are underpinned by a registry that enables the ingestion and management of models, related vocabularies and the creation of inter-related chunks of model metadata. It is argued that, through this model-driven approach, key aspects of the system are described in such a way that this description can be leveraged to enable the automation of data production.


Parallel Session 7.5 (Room 306)
Outreach Committee Round Table
Mark Reichardt, President, Open Geospatial Consortium and Steven Ramage, OGC

During this session we will explore how attenddees at the conference and members of the GSDI Association and International Geospatial Society can become more involved in supporting communication technologies and publications to better suport interaction among the global geospatial community. The session is hands on and will engage attendees in developing and revising a workplan for the GSDI Outreach and Membership Committee. All interested parties are invited to join the committee and contribute. Among issues we are likely to address at this session include development of learning materials such as videos and other media, instituting processes for reviewing and suggesting improvements to the GSDI web pages and GIKNetwork capabilities, generation of material for the annual GSDI newsletter and brainstorming on membership expansion. Please review the tentative workplan if possible before attending the session. It should be fun.


Parallel Session 8.1 (Theater)
Spatial Enablement

Developing Spatially Enabled Business Processes: The Role of Organisational Structures (60)
Ezra Dessers, Geert Van Hootegem, Joep Crompvoets (Belgium), Paul Hendriks (The Netherlands)

Although Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) is a complex concept with many facets, it is widely recognised that SDIs are about facilitating and coordinating spatial information flows. This chapter argues that the analysis of spatial information flows should not be separated from the business processes in which they are embedded. The performance of both is expected to be influenced by the structural characteristics of the organisations involved, and of their mutual relations. Task division is a central concept for describing these (inter)organisational structures. Based on theoretical considerations, the chapter advances the proposition that, given the level of complexity and dynamism of the current social environment, a move towards a more process-based and decentralised task division could contribute to the development of spatially-enabled business processes.

Implementing a Municipal SDI with Service Oriented Architecture (69)
Ali Gaemi, Tehran Municipality ICT Organazation, Farhad Samadzadegan (Islamic Republic Of Iran), Abbas Rajabifard (Australia)

The highly dynamic and complex nature of today’s metropolitans requires that any “service provision” of their municipality be fast, economical, and of high quality. This goal could only be reached through cooperating or interoperating applications. Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) are indispensable from this respect. Enabling Application-to-Application (A2A) integration, Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) promises the interoperation required by SDIs. Service Oriented Architecture strives to achieve economies of scale in the development and implementation of business solutions via the reuse of services and service components. Geospatial processes, data, applications, and technology can all be more efficiently used and implemented by leveraging SOA principles.
However, there are a number of technical issues involved in implementing municipal SDI with SOA in an enterprise organization such as municipality of metropolitans. The aim of this work is to identify these issues and derive a framework out of them which will guide the design, development, and maintenance of a large scale organization SDI. Since there is no such framework in place, implementing a SOA based municipal SDI seems a very ambitious and difficult undertaking. Although there are sparse work on the issue, they either are so general or do not deal with the issues at the desired level of practicality and detail.
Given the complexity of the issues involved and the immaturity of the SOA technologies, it is rather difficult to come up with a framework though. However, there are countermeasures and already stable components of available SOA technologies. This paper presents the specification of the service oriented approach which is used for developing the Tehran Municipality SDI. SOA constructed a distributed, dynamic, flexible, and re-configurable service system over Internet that could meet information and service requirements of many different users from inside departments of municipality or from outside by different urban organizations

Intelligent Speed Assist: Spatially Enabling Societies (73)
Hossein Mohammadi, VicRoads, Victoria, Gary Dawson, Alistair Colebatch (Australia)

The key objectives of Intelligent Speed Assist (ISA) are to achieve road safety and environmental benefits. In order to achieve these objectives it is necessary to bring speed-aware road network information into road vehicles. A speed-aware road network assists citizens to choose an appropriate speed and assists governments to maintain citizens’ safety and promote a sustainable environment.
Current and accurate speed zone data is an important requirement to support ISA initiatives. The collection, maintenance and timely distribution of a speed-aware road network is vital for the success of ISA. Key to achieving this is the establishment of necessary business processes which ensure the governance of speed limit change life cycle and distribution. This includes the governance of speed limit changes and the resultant speed sign installation and/or removal actions; new speed sign location and attribute validation; and management and control of corresponding speed zone changes. Once these business process requirements are established by an authoritative data custodian, then the accuracy and timeliness of speed zone data can be maintained.
An authoritative information source plays a key role in assuring the quality of published speed zone data prepared and issued by ISA industry data suppliers (data aggregators). Additionally, data licensing and regular audit of the ISA industry data suppliers will help ensure the use of the data meets license requirements and expectations.
This chapter discusses the business process to establish the minimum requirements for building and maintaining speed-aware road network data to support ISA objectives. Timeliness, completeness and accuracy are discussed to set out the quality requirements for ISA data.
The chapter presents ISA as one of the initiatives which contribute to a spatially enabled society, in which location and spatial information are regarded as common goods made available to citizens and businesses to assist sustainable development.
VicRoads, the statutory road authority in the State of Victoria, Australia, has commenced the acquisition and development of a speed-aware road network as part of its ISA initiative under the “arrive alive 2008 – 2017” Victorian government strategy for safer vehicles.

How Does NSDI Development Fit into Pakistan's E-Government Programme? (8)
Asmat Ali, Survey of Pakistan (Pakistan)

The notion of National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) and E-Government (hereafter referred as eGov) has grown about a decade ago, apparently, to address the challenge of quick supply of information making use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). The eGov programme was advocated and initiated by politicians where as the need to have NSDI was more emphasized, advocated and aimed by scientific and research communities rather than politicians. As, politicians govern over countries rather than scientists and researchers, therefore, eGov received more projection and recognition by the governments as compared to NSDI in countries like Pakistan.
Pakistan launched eGov programme in 2003 with the aim to deliver public service information, efficiently, effectively and economically to the citizens. Pakistan’s eGov programme included GIS for Agriculture, Natural Resources & Urban Property of Pakistan, Mapping and Database of National Cartographic Data. The programme also included establishment of Land Records Management Information System. Apparently, none of these geospatial applications can be developed with single data set. Therefore, multiple data sets are required that are possessed by different organizations due to varying mandates for data collection. Hence, the need to have a cross organizational platform such as NSDI for exchanging and sharing spatial as well as non-spatial information is inevitable. Moreover, NSDIs are built on Internet technology, which provides an ideal distributed environment for wide-spread sharing, exchanging, integration and dissemination of spatial as well as non-spatial data. Therefore, it is good opportunity to make use of internet technology as access network provided by the eGov programme of Pakistan for the development of NSDI in the country. Hence, “How does NSDI development fit into Pakistan’s E-Government programme?” is a viable question that needs to be addressed, explored and researched which is the focus of this research paper.


Parallel Session 8.2 (Room 303)
SDI Applications: Crisis Situations

Cartographic Services Provided in the Response to the Great Earthquake of February 2010 in Chile (158)
Juan Vidal, Instituto Geografico Militar de Chile, Edwin Hunt (Chile)

1. Introduction: This paper describes the way in which cartographic services supported the emergency response after the major earthquake of February 2010 in Chile.
2. Background: On the 27th of February 2010 there was an earthquake of 8.8 degrees on the Richter scale with its epicenter at Cobcquecura, on the coast of central Chile. It caused severe damage in all the cities and populated areas around it. It also triggered several tsunami waves that affected most of the ports, resorts and populated areas along the coast of central Chile. The consequences range from more than 400 fatalities to a series of serious damage to the public and private infrastructur of the country, given that the area declared as ‘zone of catastrophe’ in cludes a large part of the most densely populated areas of Chile, with a significant concentration of economic activity.
The emergency support began immediately. From the beginning, the authorities saw the need for cartographic material as an aid. The Military Geographic Institute of Chile (IGM), as the official authority responsible for the cartography portraying this country, has acted to provide this material as a matter of urgency.
3. Methodology: The IGM has worked in conjunction with several other bodies, most particularly the Army and the National Emergencies Office of the Interior Ministry – ONEMI. In the first few weeks, two groups of professional staff from the IGM moved to and worked at Army bases in the field, one in Concepcion and the other in Talca, in order to provide maps in the field, responding to the immediate needs of the organisations working in the catastrophe zone. The field teams, using as a base resource the cartography of the IGM, provided material intended for use in (i) recovering control, order and security in the zone (ii) getting basic services (water, electricity, etc) to work again (iii) putting the logistics network (roads, bridges, etc.) back into usable condition, and (iv) delimiting danger sites (for example, by risk of collapse). After, in the city of Talca a special unit, with the participation of the IGM among other institutions, was established to provide support in the long term. Currently the IGM continues to provide information and special services, now incorporating satellite images, aimed at the reconstruction activities.
The paper describes the services and materials provided, also the way in which they have been used in the field.
4. Results: The cartographic material and services have been sucessfully used by units and organisations in their operations, thus demonstrating how inter-institutional cooperation in matters involving geo-spatial information can work in emergency mode, in paralell with the normal workings of the national spatial data infrastructure.
5. Conclusions: Chilean institutions in Chile have the capacity to respond to disasters of great magnitude. Nevertheless, the experience has demonstrated that the resouces available for dealing with these situations need to be improved, in particular, the material designed for operations in the field should exist already, instead of being set up during the days following the disaster.

The Potential of Geomatics 2.0 in Crisis Management (114)
Stéphane Roche, Université Laval, Boris Mericskay (Canada), Eliane Propeck (France)

Today, the geolocation of people (and of their social networks), of goods, of services (location-based services – LBS), of processes (geotagging, geocaching…) and of all kinds of media (georeferencing of photos, of videos, or of software applications: RSS feeds) is a core component of the Internet. The expansion of the geoweb is a major materialization of geomatics democratization. This phenomenon results in the emergence of a new type of mapping based on web 2.0 technologies. Described as neogeography, this phenomenon is especially characterized by providing full interaction between the users and the technology. It is also characterized by an increase in the number of geolocation-based contents generated by users from their personal computer, and more and more from mobile devices (GPS receivers, Smartphones, ebooks…). This is Voluntereed Geographic Information – VGI. Hurricane Katrina, the 2004 south-east Asia tsunami, the 2003 SARS, fire events in California and Australia, H1N1 influenza, Haiti earthquake, all these events illustrate how the spectrum of disaster risks has evolved during the last decades. “Non-standards” events can strike anywhere, anytime, and our modern societies appear to be much more vulnerable and changing than in the past. The increase in the issues and vulnerability of risk areas (due to the interconnection of more and more complex operating systems, to the negative effects of the choices made in matters of protection, to speeded-up anthropization…) rises again the question of the impact of information, and more particularly of spatial information, with respect to contemporary disaster and crisis management. As a matter of fact, damaging events strike without warning, and generate urgency, complexity and uncertainty, which require revamped tools and organizations, and especially higher innovative information sharing processes. In such contexts, local knowledge and quick access to updated information from the field are core elements. Moreover, a report issued by the UNO in 2009 revealed that, in times of crisis, information is a major tool in terms of safety planning and of the survival of the victims, but communication networks and the technologies related to them represent capital lifelines. Consequently, it is necessary to have a closer look at the potential of these new citizen practices and of the geographic information thus generated in the context of crisis management. This issue is even more relevant as a recent series of events (fires, tsunamis, earthquakes, pandemics) has given rise to the development of numerous web mapping applications dedicated to the information and contribution of the general public so as to support crisis management. This alternative way to produce and spread geographic information in times of crisis brings up many questions and new potentials with regard to urgency services, NGO, as well as individuals. This paper aims at analyzing the potential of geoweb 2.0 applications and technologies to support crisis and disaster management through case studies.

Integrating the Paper and Digital Environments for Crisis/Emergency Response: Lessons Learned (116)
Talbot Brooks, Delta State University (USA)

Tremendous energy and effort is applied to improving, distributing, and visualizing spatial data in an electronic environment. Proportionally, little is invested in paper products and the means needed to produce them. Regardless of a nation's wealth or status, when a significant crisis or emergency occurs, “traditional” geospatial resources are sidelined either through systems failure or a lack of interoperability. A paper map product, or digital raster graphic thereof, is the lowest common denominator and most often used solution by responders. As the emergency/disaster response community is based in vetted standards and standardized approaches, so should any mapping product designed to support them. Spatial data infrastructure designs must consider the need for paper products and their use by the emergency/disaster response community through the inclusion of elements that allow for use of standardized symbols, scales, and coordinate systems. This presentation accompanying paper will discuss application areas and needs from both the geospatial professional and emergency responder perspectives and will draw on first-hand experiences from Hurrican Katrina, Florida wildfires in 2009, the Haitian earthquake, and a number of other disasters.

Geographic Business Intelligence and HIV/AIDS Monitoring in Haiti (24)
Andrew Schroeder, Direct Relief International (USA)

During the Global Health Council's 2009 International AIDS Candlelight Memorial, the Abbott Fund and its partners launched a new broad-based national testing campaign in Haiti. In 2009 Abbott donated 500,000 Determine HIV 1/2 rapid test kits to the Haitian VCT program, sufficient to cover the anticipated testing needs of Haiti for a single six-month period. The aims of this donation were to ensure constant supply and ubiquitous presence of HIV diagnostics across the country as means to encourage scale-up of testing activity and improvement in the numbers of persons who know their testing status and are referred to treatment.
In conjunction with the test donation program, Direct Relief International mapped the locations of all testing facilities and associated diagnostic and ARV treatment data with each testing site. New data has been linked to historical data as a means of baseline comparison at the site level. Through site mapping we can observe, measure and communicate change over time and space. Using an integrated combination of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and business intelligence software we have produced a geographically-enabled dashboard of program indicators. The Haiti VCT geo-dashboard brings together in a single information space critical data pertaining to Haiti's HIV programs while enabling analysis of spatial patterns in testing data at multiple scales. All program stakeholders, including members of the general public, may have a rich, and dynamic common operating picture of program activity. Over the next 12 months Direct Relief, Abbott and Abbott Fund will be extending this model of geographic business intelligence to enable cross-country comparison through technologically sophisticated, transparent and continually updated program monitoring and evaluation.
The implication of the VCT geo-dashboard is that geographic data visualization tools can make vital contributions to the communication and monitoring of large-scale public health and philanthropic programs by removing barriers to data integration and rapid pattern recognition by a range of stakeholders. The Haiti VCT geo-dashboard emphasizes public sharing of data and ease of use in querying and linking variables, foregrounding technological enhancements to communications of programmatic activity. This model has profound implications for global public health programs by demonstrating analytical richness which sacrifices neither communicational facility nor informational transparency.


Parallel Session 8.3 (Room 304)
Participatory Initiatives

Google Map Maker -- Use of Crowd-sourcing to Support SDI Initiatives Around the World (112)
France Lamy, Google (USA), Lalit Katragadda, Manik Gupta (India), Adam Lasnik, Jessica Pfund (USA)

At Google, we believe that users are the local experts and that a rich and accurate map of the world must therefore reflect users’ knowledge. We empower users in this area by offering several online tools, one of the most powerful being Google Map Maker. This tool enables communities at large and even non-technical users to build high quality maps of their neighborhoods, cities and countries. By using high resolution imagery, Map Maker users can add, edit, and moderate most features on maps including roads, businesses, parks, schools and more. These updates are then viewable by many millions of people globally.
In the last year, users from around the world have actively contributed their local knowledge with everything from mapping entire countries to adding information on specific features of interest. In many countries, this dataset is fully available for download by non-profits, government agencies and individuals for non-commercial use. Google is committed to making the result of everyone's work available, useful, and accessible, including Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) initiatives around the world.
This talk will illustrate the important role that crowdsourcing technology can play -- by using the web and harnessing citizen power and knowledge -- to actively support SDIs as a collaborative, virtual, and dynamic data content management system, still meeting the SDI’s usual regulatory requirements and core functions. We will also provide an overview of ways that Map Maker is currently being used around the world. The talk will conclude with the mention of some open directions of research for Google to better support community empowerment and also engage with communities of users, with the goal of better understanding the needs, requirements, and obstacles that these groups may face when using Map Maker.

Volunteered Geographic Information in Spatial Data Infrastructure: An Early Look At Opportunities and Constraints (905)
David Coleman (Canada)

Advances in personal positioning, Web mapping, cellular communications and wiki technologies have surpassed the original visions of the architects of spatial data infrastructure programs around the world. Using GPS-based cellphones and personal navigations systems, people now view their own position (and those of others) in real time on a backdrop of georeferenced maps and/or imagery. Similarly, they can share location information describing points of interest, places visited, recent construction, and corrections to out-of-date feature attributes. This capability to “view and provide contributions in context” is fundamental to the vision of a spatially enabled society.
By tapping the distributed knowledge, personal time and energy of volunteer contributors, GI voluntarism has the potential to relocate and redistribute selected GI productive activities from mapping agencies to networks of non-state volunteer actors. However, if we are to design strategies and systems to maximize its advantages and minimize the risks to authoritative mapping programs, we must have a clear understanding of the people and technologies involved.
This chapter describes a program of research led by the author in examining the risks and opportunities created by the emergence of Volunteered Geographic Information (or “VGI”) as a viable means of updating and enriching authoritative geographic information databases maintained by public and private sector providers. After briefly summarizing early research into the nature and motivation of contributors, the author develops a framework to compare three very different programs driven by volunteered contributions in Australia, the United States, and internationally Geological Survey . Finally, the author describes early empirical accuracy testing results and important questions to be posed by authoritative data providers when considering VGI as a source of data updates.

Learning From the Crowd: The Role of Volunteered Geographic Information in Realising a Spatially Enabled Society (45)
Serene Ho, University of Melbourne, Abbas Rajabifard (Australia)

Governments around the world are currently striving to realise a spatially enabled society. This is achieved when location is used to organise information, which is then made freely available to society to endeavour towards benefits in creativity and productivity, and improvements in transparency and decision-making. The currency of this ideal is a corollary of the changing relationship between people and information, in which geo-referenced information is rapidly becoming normative as it provides an additional degree of personal relevance. People’s roles are also changing; they are no longer passive consumers of information but are becoming active producers – a behaviour manifested most obviously online.
One of the challenges that have been identified in realising a spatially enabled society is the development of a spatial data infrastructure (SDI) that would support the wider society. Most SDIs typically comprise participants such as national spatial data agencies, government or private organisations, who have traditional or commercial roles in producing spatial information. This leaves a large part of society, such as community groups or ordinary citizens, with nominal roles within the SDI and potentially disengaged. The challenge of how the SDI can support the wider society would therefore need to address two inherent issues: recognising society’s role, and the design itself of the SDI to facilitate the functions of that role.
The nascent discipline of volunteered geographic information (VGI) offers an opportunity to investigate both these issues, especially from society’s perspective. Although voluntarism has always been present in some way or form in the collection of spatial information, it has never before existed on such a prolific scale as evidenced from the plethora of sites on the internet that use, produce and share geo-referenced data. VGI is essentially the production of spatial information for society by society and this paper is predicated on VGI being a potential role for society and a function within the SDI. Therefore, how can we engage with the significant volume of spatial information that has been generated from VGI? How can VGI be facilitated and supported with the eventual aim of incorporating it into a national SDI?
This paper will discuss the body of research that has been conducted to examine and understand the nature of VGI and the issues and challenges in engaging with it. It will use case studies of web applications that can demonstrate successful participation with their target communities to deliberate the technical, social, institutional and legal issues associated with designing an enabling platform, specifically the user interface, to act as a portal for VGI. It will also look to the future and consider new concepts and technologies such as the spatial marketplace and the impending ICT revolution. Finally, the paper will conclude with proposed guidelines for the design of an enabling platform for VGI so it can be a means of facilitating engagement, and eventually allow for incorporation into any vision for realising a spatially enabled society.

Multi Sector Governance - How do We Get Everyone to Participate? (34)
Kylie Armstrong, Landgate on behalf of the CRCSI (Australia)

Spatially Enabling Australia is the challenge for the new Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information (CRCSI) . This research and development that includes contributions from Universities, Government and the private sector will focus on 3 core areas over the next 7 years to deliver enablement in Positioning, Extraction and Spatial Infrastructure (SI).
As part of the key deliverables for the Spatial Infrastructure element, Australia is expanding the traditional Government or research driven SDI model to deliver a truly national infrastructure or marketplace that will provide for Government, research and industry. Included will be an expansion of the delivery from just data to include a whole suite of services and products that will be both created and orchestrated together by all sectors.
One specific area of research is the national, state and commercial requirements for a governance framework supporting business critical use of SI. The digital economy requires core infrastructure to provide transaction certainty. In the context of information infrastructure, good operational governance underpins such certainty. A practical and rigorous governance framework, whose technical implementation is scalable for Spatial Infrastructure (SI) growth, is currently not available outside of a purely government or commercial realm and is limited to only a data context to current or prospective infrastructure users at a National level. An expansion of this model is critical to the long term viability of spatial resource use and an ongoing marketplace.
In order to support traditional users of SI and the growing marketplace a governance approach that is both restrictive and enabling is required. Governance rules and policy will provide security where needed while simultaneously reducing access barriers and enhancing opportunities and business uses of SI. A privacy-compliant infrastructure will increase the range of information that can be made available.
This paper will:
- Analyse the options for a governance framework which supports business critical use of SI and encourages investment in the spatial information marketplace; and
- Introduce guidelines, and policy recommendations, for a national governance and security framework for spatial information use.
- Discuss the technical and procedural measures to ensure the correct handling and disclosure of personal information needed to be built into the model.
- Illustrate the collaborate environment and delivery framework required to provide a model for all participants.


Parallel Session 8.4 (Room 305)
Standards and Interoperability

Point Based Integration for Geo-Spatial Data Infrastructures (138)
Ismail Wadembere, Makerere University, Patrick Ogao (Uganda)

There exists a lot of spatial data due advances in geo-spatial data capturing and collection technologies and tools like GPS, Satellite, Hand held Cameras, and total station based ground survey methods which are now available in most parts of developing world. But these data are not fully utilized when making geo-spatial decision not because of lack of analysis and modeling packages and personal skills, but mainly to due lack of an easy way to bring those data together so the different data sets can support and supplement the understanding and utilization of each other.
In this paper, we present an approach which can be used to integrate geo-spatial data basing on points to represent the different spatial elements (point, polylines, and polygons) which make up spatial objects/feature and for correlating the features in different data sets and for building spatial data infrastructures (SDI).
Eith is approach, the nodes and vertices are the characteristics of points that are used to integrate and related different data in SDI. It has the advantage that GIS practitioners deal with one type of spatial element and since it is the bases of all geo-database manipulation, it makes it easy to exchange data in different form. This provides a start towards solving the issue of spatial integration of data comprising of many complex features with varying geometries which makes it difficult for users to develop one approach to adjust the discrepancies among thematically similar data sets. It also provides avenue for geo-spatial data storage and manipulation in opens standards like Geography Markup Language (GML)

Conceptualizing Representational Semantics: A Multiple Layered Spatial Data Integration Framework Based on Ontology (124)
Chen chieh Feng, Department of Geography, National University of Singapore, Liang Yu (Singapore)

Domain ontologies have been used as an effective mean to reconcile the heterogeneities between different spatial data sources. Most domain ontologies focus on the concepts from real world, but do not specify the semantics of the way to represent them. However, heterogeneities exist in forms of different frameworks (standards), data models (schemas), measurement backgrounds, algorithms, spatial-temporal features, etc, which makes seamless data integration a non-trivial work. Even if we have solved the problem of identifying domain concepts from different sources, we still have to deal with fusing the data associated with the same concept but from different representations.
Representational semantics are about the concepts which give the semantic of how we measure and organize the result of observation of concepts from real world, e.g. property and relation, unit, coordinate system and process model. They are, while always implicit in all kinds of data and IS, very important for engineers responsible for the data management and integration, and users who want to evaluate the viability of the data for a specific task, for their indispensability for supporting semantic alignment, data structure conversions, and mathematical computations, all of which are crucial steps toward a successful integration of spatial databases.
In this paper we argued that both domain ontologies and their conceptual representations are essential to spatial data integration and assuming complimentary roles . We proposed to capture and formalize representational semantics for the spatial data, together with domain ontologies, to facilitate semantic-dependent data integration with heterogeneous data sources and processing models. By separating the two-level ontologies, more restrictions and axioms can be added to them, the enhanced reasoning ability can improve the seamless spatial data integration. Our prototype will show how to incorporate the representational semantics to domain ontology. We also discussed the process of identifying/specifying representational semantics from existing standards. Regarding to our researching project, CSDGM metadata standard, SWEET ontology and SensorML are taken into consideration.

Extending SLD and SE for Cartograms (54)
Emanuel Rita, IST / INESC-ID, José Borbinha, Bruno Martins (Portugal)

Thematic maps are intended to provide statistical information associated with a certain geographic area. Despite the recent development in the area of the map services on the Web, we realize that the standards proposed by Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) do not yet offer specific functionality for creating thematic maps. We studied works that proposed extensions to these standards in order to facilitate the creation of such maps, and proposed a new extension that allows the creation of cartograms. The creation of cartograms was not considered in the previous studies. We implement this extension in the GeoServer, a well known a largely used map server.

User-Generated Spatial Content and the Need for SDI Standards (105)
Steven Ramage, Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (UK), Mark Reichardt, President OGC (USA)

The geospatial technologies industry and cooperative spatial data infrastructure programs worldwide provide governments, local communities, non-governmental organizations, businesses, the academic community and citizens with increasingly useful tools to solve a wide range of problems.
In the last 3-5 years mobile devices and easy-to-use web services have added a new dimension to this progress. Previously, most mapping and spatial data infrastructure development was performed by or for governments. Today, information services used by all sectors of society are becoming spatially enabled and are contributing to the development of the global spatial data infrastructure. Citizens with hand-held devices incorporating phones, cameras, GPS, maps and location services, and also internet-connected sensors embedded in homes, offices, stores, and vehicles are contributing location and descriptive data.
The volume and importance of user-generated geospatial content has grown rapidly in these last years, and this growth poses important technical, social, and institutional challenges. The democratization of spatial data is helping us to realize spatially enabled societies. In this paper we examine the associated opportunities, as well as the challenges, and offer general approaches to addressing them through OGC standards.


Parallel Session 8.5 (Room 306)
Building SDIs with Open Source

Hands On Experience of GeoNode
Sebastian Benthall, OpenGeo (US)

While in the past Spatial Data Infrastructure has been about portals and top-down organization, a new paradigm is emerging. We know now that collaborative action is the secret to effective information management. Enter the GeoNode, an open source SDI initiative developed by a partnership of the World Bank's CAPRA initiative, OpenGeo, and others. It is built on mature open source projects like PostGIS, GeoServer, OpenLayers, GeoNetwork and DJango.

Attendees to this introduction to the GeoNode will learn how to bring the best practices of the web to their Spatial Data Infrastructure. After an overview of the bottom-up philosophy guiding the GeoNode project, we will explore how its features live up to this philosophy, including:
* Web tools for uploading data and annotating with metadata.
* The use of user profiles, and Web 2.0 features to inform metadata and catalogue search
* Applications for data editing, styling, and map composition
* Pluggable architecture for extending SDI's with targeted applications
* Installation and deployment of the GeoNode..

Active Exploration of an Open Source Suite
Chris Holmes, President, OpenGeo (US)

This presentation will explain, while attendees use, the five components that comprise the OpenGeo Suite: PostGIS, a robust spatial database built on PostgreSQL; GeoServer, a spatial data server; GeoWebCache, a tile cache server; OpenLayers, a browser-based map renderer; and GeoExt, a library for creating rich browser applications. Also showcased will be GeoExplorer, a browser-based map composer and publisher, and Styler, a graphical style (SLD) editor.


Plenary Session: Tuesday Afternoon

Spatially Enabling Society: Global Visions

A Personal Vision for Spatially Enabling Society
Jack Dangermond, President and Founder, Esri
Lead Keynote Address by the Global Citizen Award Recipient

forthcoming

The Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS): The Vision, Progress and Future Plans
Ivan DeLoatch, Staff Director, Federal Geographic Data Committee, US

The Group on Earth Observations set out on an ambitious journey in February 2005 with the adoption of the 10-Year Implementation Plan to establish the Global Earth Observations System of System (GEOSS). GEO is at the mid-point of this effort. I will convey the successes, challenges, and future activities as GEO continues to move forward in realizing the vision of GEOSS - a coordinated, comprehensive, and sustainable system of systems.

Global Spatial Data Infrastructure (GSDI) Visions for Spatial Enablement
Abbas Rajabifard, President, GSDI Association, Australia

Spatial enablement will assist both developed and developing countries to pursue sustainable development objectives and it will ensure better productivity and efficiency. In this environment, the GSDI Association plays a critical role in helping to address societal problems through the use of spatial capacity. The betterment of societies through spatial enablement is one of the GSDI goals as part of its current strategy plan. Therefore, the essence of what we do in the Association is help to create an enabling environment that enhances outcomes in societies, economies and the global environment. This presentation will discuss the concepts and components of spatial enabled societies and presents GSDI objectives and activities to facilitate societies to realise their spatial enabled societies.


Plenary Session: Wednesday Morning

Spatially Enabling Society: Expanding Visions

An Exemplar Local Vision: The Singapore Geospatial Collaborative Environment (SG-SPACE)
Ng Siau Yong, Director of Geospatial Division, Singapore Land Authority. Singapore SDI

Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) is developed in many countries to provide for efficient and effective usage of geospatial data and information, which underpinned analysis and decision making for environmental, social and economic growth. The SDI policies were also put in place to ensure that geospatial data are made available in high quality, interoperable and timely manner.
The Singapore’s NSDI initiative which is known as the SG-SPACE (Singapore Geospatial Collaboration Environment) was launched in April 2008. The SG-SPACE is a cross-agencies program spearheaded by the Singapore Land Authority (SLA) under the Ministry of Law, together with the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) under the Ministry of Information, Communications and Arts. The SG-SPACE aims to provide a platform and mechanism for government agencies to share and use geospatial data. Ultimately it facilitates better policy, decision-making and governance. Beyond data-sharing, SG-SPACE aims to create a sustainable environment where geospatial data is interoperable, accessible and usable by agencies in day-to-day operation. This geospatial data will eventually be extended to enterprises and citizens for value and knowledge creation. This presentation describes the development of the Singapore’s National Spatial Data Infrastructure, SG-SPACE.

An Exemplar Regional Vision
Santiago Borrero, Pan American Institute of Geography and Histroy (PAIGH)

Singapore is a distant place from The Americas and most probably on this occasion, there will be a reduced number of presentations dealing with SDI in this part of the World. For this reason the author intends to report on the current SDI status in the region, in addition to the situation ath the national level, giving priority to regional on-going projects, such as the Latin American Development Bank -CAF and the Panamerican Institute for Geography and History -PAIGH initiative GeoSUR, an SDI related program of a supranational nature, currently in its third year of implementation and with a good level of success, including a geoportal for South America and a good number of geo services already in place.
By comparing with the presentation submitted at GSDI 10 in Trinidad and Tobago, the author will explore some trends at the national level and will refer especially to two: (1) The need for a sound modernization initiative comprising capacity building at the institutional level, beyond current educational practices, providing new attention to key SDI aspects such as interoperability certification and validation of standards in the Americas; and (2) Reference will be made to two different situations, the cases of Chile and Haiti in the context of SDI and natural disasters. Given the need to raise the level of participation within the international geospatial community, including SDI and IGS, the presentation will conclude with a reference to this situation in the case of the Americas.

Spatially Enabled Land Administration: Addressing Societal Needs and Responding to the Global Agenda
Stig Enemark, President, International Federation of Surveyors (FIG) and Aalborg University (Denmark)

All countries have to deal with the management of land. They have to deal with the four functions of land tenure, land value, land use, and land development in some way or another. A country’s capacity may be advanced and combine all the activities in one conceptual framework supported by sophisticated ICT models. More likely, however, capacity will involve very fragmented and basically analogue approaches.
This paper provides an overall understanding of the land management paradigm towards spatially enabled government. Place matters! Everything happens somewhere. If we can understand more about the nature of “place” where things happen, and the impact on the people and assets on that location, we can plan better, manage risk better, and use our resources better.
Land administration is addressing societal needs. In Western cultures it would be hard to imagine a society without having property rights as a basic driver for development and economic growth. In most developing countries, however, about 70% of the land is outside the formal land administration system.
Land administration should also address the key challenges of the new millennium such as climate change, natural disasters, and rapid urban growth. The linkage between climate change adaptation and sustainable development should be self-evident. Measures for adaptation to climate change and disaster risk management must be integrated into strategies for poverty reduction to ensure sustainable development and for meeting the Millennium Development Goals.
The land management perspective and the operational component of spatially enabled land administration systems therefore need high-level political support and recognition.

Enabling Technologies and Institutions
Mark Reichardt, President, Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)

Geospatial technologies and standards are facilitating Spatial Data infrastructure (SDI) solutions worldwide. At the same time, social, political and legal trends are shaping the landscape for geospatial information sharing and application within and across organizations and communities of interest. Recent Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and complimentary standards work is discussed in the context of SDI, and use cases involving ocean monitoring, water resource management, location services, and emergency and disaster management are provided. Emphasis is placed on the implications of institutional policy and law on the future direction of the use of spatial information and tools for improved decision making and services; and how SDI best practices can help organizations increase efficiency and maximize return on IT investment.


Plenary Session: Thursday Morning

Spatially Enabling Society: Corporate Sector Perspectives

Abu Dhabi Spatial Data Infrastructure (AD-SDI)
Abdul Karim Al Raeisi, Executive Manager, Abu Dhabi Systems and Information Centre (ADSIC)

After two years of its inception, the Abu Dhabi Spatial Data Infrastructure (AD-SDI) was successful in growing into a Community of practice with more than 40 stakeholder entities from local and federal government, businesses and academia. Capitalizing on the achievement of the AD-SDI Initiative for building phases one and two i.e. foundation and basic institutionalization; the Spatial Data Center has embarked, under the flagship of Abu Dhabi Systems and Information Center, into phase three that is titled innovation and adaptive management for sustained operations, advanced analysis and decision making. The Initiative that has full buy-in and support by Abu Dhabi leadership, has succeeded so far in achieving its target goals and benefits, and is growing to support and strengthen the achievements of several community pillars; this includes environment, education, health, infrastructure assets, safety and security and Abu Dhabi’s values, culture and heritage. Significant developments this year address participating entities GIS roadmaps and capacity building, g-maturity assessment, spatial education and major strategic programs coordination, in alignment with the AD-SDI Strategic Plan 2010-2014 and the Abu Dhabi Government 2030 vision and policy agenda. Looking into the future, the AD-SDI is striving to become more than a “sound practice” but also a new showcase and “best of breed” baseline that others will aspire to, and the compass direction for leveraging governance, technology and information towards sustainable development regionally and globally.

Dispelling Myths Surrounding Cloud Computing - and how to leverage this paradigm shift to spatially enable society
Kingsley Wood, Business Development and Sales, Amazon Asia-Pacific Resources Pvt. Ltd.

Kingsley Wood will cover the common myths and misconceptions swirling around the buzz term “cloud computing” and highlight the true value and enormous gains this technology can provide the computation and data intensive applications that GIS demand.

Keynote Title (to be announced)
SpeakerName, Title/Affiliation

forthcoming


Plenary Session: Friday Afternoon
Featured Keynote: A Global Vision for Spatially Enabling Society
Paul Cheung, Director, United Nations Statistics

forthcoming

Wrap-up Keynote: Ian Williamson, University of Melbourne

forthcoming

Wrap-up Keynote: Greg Scott, Past-President, PCGIAP

forthcoming

GSDI 11 Proceedings by GSDI Association is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.