A Spatial Data Infrastructure Review - Sorting the Actors and Policies from Enterprise Viewpoint

Abstract

The Commission on Geoinformation Infrastructures and Standards of the International Cartographic Association (ICA) has proposed a model based on five perspectives to describe Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDIs) using the Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP) framework. This model was later extended by other researchers to describe the hierarchical relationship among SDIs and the interactions related with policies of an SDI, using the RM-ODP elements for these descriptions. However, the elements initially proposed by the ICA and the extended elements differ in terminology and semantically. This paper proposes unifying these elements, more precisely the actors and policies of the Enterprise Perspective proposed in the ICA model and its extensions in order to create a single model to describe SDIs, thus guaranteeing a common language when designing an SDI, besides facilitating knowledge sharing among designers.