Abstract
Abstract. As most development planning and rendering of public services happens at a place or in a space, geospatial data is required. This geospatial data is best managed through a spatial data infrastructure, which has as a key objective to share geospatial data. The collection and maintenance of geospatial data is expensive and time consuming and so the principle of “collect once – use many times” should apply. It is best to obtain the geospatial data from the authoritative source – the appointed data custodian. In South Africa the South African Spatial Data Infrastructure (SASDI) is the means to achieve the requirement for geospatial data sharing. This requires geospatial data sharing to take place between the data custodian and the user. All data custodians are expected to comply with the Spatial Data Infrastructure Act (SDI Act) in terms of geo-spatial data sharing. Currently data custodians are experiencing challenges with regard to the sharing of geospatial data. This research is based on the current ten data themes selected by the Committee for Spatial Information and the organisations identified as the data custodians for these ten data themes. The objectives are to determine whether the identified data custodians comply with the SDI Act with respect to geospatial data sharing, and if not what are the reasons for this. Through an international comparative assessment it then determines if the compliance with the SDI Act is not too onerous on the data custodians. The research concludes that there are challenges with geospatial data sharing in South Africa and that the data custodians only partially comply with the SDI Act in terms of geospatial data sharing. However, it is shown that the South African legislation is not too onerous on the data custodians.
Highlights
Effective policy formulation and decision making, and the subsequent monitoring and evaluation of these, require relevant information
The Director of National Spatial Information Framework (NSIF) was interviewed to assess how South African data custodians comply with geospatial data sharing requirements and what is her view on the legislation within South Africa regarding geospatial data sharing and implementation of South African Spatial Data Infrastructure (SASDI)
The results clearly shows that the majority of the identified data custodians have knowledge of the Spatial Data Infrastructure Act (SDI Act) and a high level of familiarity with the Committee for Spatial Information (CSI) activities, with six out of seven having a rating of 4 and more
Summary
Effective policy formulation and decision making, and the subsequent monitoring and evaluation of these, require relevant information. There are organisations that have the requisite expertise and other resources to collect the required geospatial data These organisations are collecting the geospatial data routinely as part of their business and can be regarded as reliable sources of the geospatial data. Such geospatial data collected is regarded as authoritative data. The principle of ‘collect once – use many times’ is regarded as part of sound geospatial data governance. This requires that there is geospatial data sharing taking place between the data custodian and the user (data recipient)
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