Awareness as a foundation for developing effective spatial data infrastructures

Abstract

The development of an effective spatial data infrastructure (SDI) often occurs in a fragmented organizational environment requiring a high level of inter-organizational collaboration. Different organizations from various jurisdictions need to work together closely when agreeing on how they will jointly register, store, use and share data and how they will make their data available to the wider society. However, this collaboration is generally regarded as very difficult. For example people often resist data sharing across organizational boundaries due to loss of control, power and independency. Organizational issues are thus considered one of the fundamental constraints to inter-organizational sharing of spatial data. How can we overcome these constraints? In the spatial community, the term awareness is often regarded as a tool for minimizing problems concerned with inter-organizational collaboration. However, a major problem in using the term awareness in discussions of inter-organizational collaboration is that awareness is undefined and often misused as a term in the community. The (over)-use of the term awareness, without having a rigorous definition to rely on makes it harder to understand and develop collaboration issues. The difficulty in quantifying and describing issues in collaboration makes the development of effective SDIs problematic for the developers of these structures. This paper therefore suggests that the development of SDIs should be based on a conceptual framework that clearly addresses the problems spatial organizations currently encounter. As a result, the focus of this paper is on the nature and role of awareness. It explores why and how awareness plays a fundamental role in overcoming organizational constraints and in developing collaboration between organizations. The paper discusses the concept of awareness in the area of organizational collaboration in the spatial community, explains the important role awareness plays in the development of spatial data infrastructures, and introduces a methodology to promote awareness. Furthermore, the paper aims to make people in the community more aware of the use of the term “awareness”—when to use it, how to use it and especially important, how not to use it. The paper will investigate awareness in the field of land administration systems.