by Prof. David J. Coleman, President-elect
Global Spatial Data Infrastructure Association

At the GSDI 12 Conference in Singapore last October, I enjoyed the discussions and people's speculations over what "SDI 2.0" would look like. Their ideas about use volunteered geographic information, even better interoperability, and greater reach and range of web services were exciting.

But- Aren't we already beyond "SDI 2.0"? I think so.

Those first SDI efforts in more developed nations that started in the early 1990s-- "SDI 1.0", if you will --were rooted firmly in the leading-edge technology of that era. Influenced by public sector mapping organizations, those programs were devoted to enabling people to: (1) specify the type(s) of spatial data for which they were searching: (2) find out on-line where & how they could be accessed; and then (3) either download or place an order for the files on CD. Regardless of how the data arrived on one's desk, they were then loaded onto a computer workstation and manipulated using software on that computer.

SDI 1.0 encouraged better and better on-line access to support off-line usage of geospatial data. Curiously, although many of these government organizations also were establishing national GPS control networks at the same time, there wasn't much formal attention paid to real-time positioning and navigation as part of the national SDI. Private companies took the lead in developing Location-Based Services.

Today, much of our work is conducted on the Web and "in the cloud". Modern transaction-based applications -- geared to everything from real property information services to trip route planning -- represent a fundamental shift away from earlier usage patterns. Rather than the "find it, get it and save it" usage patterns of SDI 1.0, today's mainstream users access information on line, and then "use it, and lose it". Each view becomes a disposable commodity, employed for a given purpose, and then deleted.

The ante is being increased again with the convergence of: (1) inexpensive, easy-to-use GPS; (2) widely available, high-quality street network databases covering entire countries; (3) high-speed digital wireless communication systems; and (4) networked servers and processors capable of handling hundreds or thousands of simultaneous on-line requests.
Table 1 illustrates some of the early examples of this convergence. Most widespread applications today employ the technology to enable people to know their own location or that of specific things. Future applications will move beyond this to provide things with the ability to recognize and act based on past, present or predicted future locations of other things.

Are today's SDIs as we know them capable of supporting all this? Not yet. Not completely. You can count on these developments having a big impact on future partnerships between public and private data suppliers, third-party distributors, and strategic partners.

David Coleman is President-elect of the GSDI Association. He is a professor of geomatics engineering and Dean of the Faculty of Engineering at the University of New Brunswick in Canada.

An edited version of this article with graphics and/or photos was published in the March 2011 issue of GIM International.