A Theoretical Proposition for Spatial Data Infrastructure On-Going Improvement

Abstract

The past three decades have seen technology become ubiquitous and impact on many fields academically and in professional practice. In geo-information, data acquisition and management have manifested through technologies such as global positioning systems, remote sensing, geographical information systems, unmanned aerial vehicles and improved photogrammetric processes. With all these improved technological capabilities, geospatial data collection, processing and dissemination have become possible in greater proportions. To reap from this technological boom, the geospatial information community has come up with a pervasive and network enabling concept called spatial data infrastructure (SDI). Over the years, several countries have embraced the SDI concept to shape policy, build and share geospatial information resources. Some levels of successes have been reported in number of developed countries while developing countries have struggled. For instance, in 2010, SDI state of play assessment results of nine African countries averaged 30.70 over 56 or 0.55 while the SDI readiness index of the same countries averaged 0.50 on an index scale of 0 to 1 in 2016. The 2010 and 2016 assessments concluded that in African countries, SDI development was slow. To address the problem of slow SDI development in Africa, this paper proposes an on-going improvement theoretical approach anchored on the theory of constraints.