Backgrounds

Spatial data infrastructure (SDI) is generally defined as the technologies, policies, and people necessary to promote sharing of geospatial data throughout all levels of government, the private and non-profit sectors, and the academic community. Goal of SDI is to reduce duplication of effort among agencies, improve quality and reduce costs related to geographic information, to make geographic data more accessible to the public, to increase the benefits of using available data, and to establish key partnerships with states, counties, cities, tribal nations, academia and the private sector to increase data availability.

In recent years, significant developments have been made in Spatial Data Infrastructure. Datasets of various types have been produced at national, regional and global levels. Efforts have also been made at city level. Currently the development of SDI is not balance in different countries and regions. With the further development of SDI, increasing attention is paid to the application and service of SDI. More efforts should be undertaken to study application-related issues of SDI.

Terms of Reference

• Development and management of multi-scale national, regional and global databases;

• Data harmonisation and synergy approaches of multi-scale vector data and imagery;

• Integration of spatial information with environmental and socio-economic data for various geographic information services;

• Standards for content, access, interoperability, evolve and update of data framework;

• Development of comprehensive metadata, quality evaluation procedures and their standardization;

• Cooperation and Liaison with GSDI, WGISS, ICA, OGC and ISO.