View GSDI President, Bas Kok, presentation and speech.

Professor Bas Kok was invited to the ESRI International User Conference to talk about data sharing strategies for spatial data infrastructures. He emphasized that there are major opportunities today for SDI communities. He presented the GSDI Association and its projects including the SDI Cookbook for standards, the Knowledge Portal on Geographic Information Network, Sponsored Projects and Small Grants Program. He also explained how GSDI cooperates with many regions around the world and is working at present with the Asia and Pacific countries to promote spatial enablement of governments. A spatially enabled government or SEG is an important tool for the countries' ICT, e-government and information sharing strategies.

He presented examples of successful national SDIs in line with INSPIRE:

• Spain has a well balanced approach between the federal states and the autonomous regions.
• Norway provides their citizens with all the essential spatial data in the public domain, developed by all the necessary partners with highly advanced web tools.
• Sweden is one of the initiators of the EULIS project which endorses cooperation between the EU cadastres in promoting optimized access of different cadastral systems throughout Europe.
• Finland is an active initiator in endorsing the development of the spatial data infrastructures in the North Pole area.
• Lithonia is using their own national approved structure plan for land information as a frame work for the INSPIRE implementation.
• And the results in the Netherlands are very interesting because of SDI authentic registers must be obligatory used by all public organizations, and the process of successful SDI development has led to tremendous impact in the national Space for Geo Information program. The successes I just mentioned are diverse but very interesting.

The USA has been successful in building and implementing a national spatial data infrastructure. The FGDC is acting as strong advocators in the expansion of the SDI model throughout the world. They made a lot of progress in the US as promoter for data enclosure and towards the development of portals and clearing houses around the globe.

In Canada the government took the initiative to develop a strategy for cooperation between government and different types of user groups such as health and security. Geo Connection Canada is the institute that creates these partnerships often in cooperation with the private sector, universities and knowledge centers.

Also remarkable is the progress that the United Nations, UNSDI is making as well as the world- wide activities of GEO GEOSS, the Global Earth Observation System of Systems. More than 30 Ministers throughout the world attended their last World Summit in Cape Town.

The time is now ripe to bring together all these successes from the different regions throughout the world, and also between the other spatial communities.

The GSDI 11 conference in Rotterdam, The Netherlands from June 15th till June 19th will build on this thought.