The future of spatial data infrastructures (SDI)

SUMMARY

The IDEAIS Seminars are part of the monthly seminars that seek to address issues related to the IDEAIS network: Intelligent assistants for spatial data infrastructures. These will be related to artificial intelligence, spatial data infrastructure, spatial and spatio-temporal data management in general, with a focus on open activities for the community in general.

SDIs were born in the 1990s as a spin-off of the more general data infrastructures and digital libraries. As such their focus was one of publishing data and their descriptions (metadata) in catalogs as if they were library resources. Another whole decade was devoted to the creation of OGC and ISO type norms and standards. The impetus and funding came from the top-down, from governments in order to harmonize geographic data and achieve economies of scale in its publication and use. But after much effort by many people the SDIs devised in 1990 have not achieved great success in terms of demand and impact. Over the last 20 years many things - technological, political, social - have changed and so it is interesting to consider how to restart SDIs. I describe some possible futures for this field of R&D for the 2030 and 2040 horizons.

PRESENTS

Michael Gould, PhD from the University of Buffalo (New York) and full professor at the Universitat Jaume I since 1998 (currently part-time). He was a pioneer in R&D in Spatial Data Infrastructures, member of the drafting committee of the INSPIRE standards (metadata), and chairman of the board of the European Association of Geographic Information Laboratories (AGILE). Since 2008 he has been working for Esri, Inc. as Global Education Manager, on projects with universities, ministries, NGOs, and the more than 80 Esri offices worldwide. During the last year he has participated in a discussion group writing an article on the world "beyond SDIs" https://eurogi.org/category/beyond-sdi/.

 

WHEN & WHERE

Thursday, May 27, at 11.00 a.m. (Santiago de Chile time)

Registration at: http://bit.ly/III-Ideais