Abstract
Geospatial data are essential for the decision-making process. However, obtaining and keeping such data up to date usually require much time and many financial resources. In order to minimize the production costs and incentivize sharing these data, countries are promoting the implementation of Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) at the different public administration levels. The International Cartographic Association (ICA) proposes a formal model that describes the main concepts of an SDI based on three of the five viewpoints of the Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP). Afterwards, researchers extended ICA’s model to describe, more properly, the actors, hierarchical relationship and interactions related to the policies that drive an SDI. However, the proposed extensions are semantically inconsistent with the original proposal. Moreover, the use of ICA’s formal model and its extensions has not been assessed yet to specify a corporate-level SDI. This study describes the merger of actors and policies proposed by the ICA and its extensions in order to eliminate differences in the semantics or terminology among them. This unified model was applied to specify a corporate SDI for a large Brazilian corporation, the Minas Gerais Power Company (Companhia Energética de Minas Gerais (Cemig)), which is comprised of about 200 companies in the power sector. The case study presents part of the specification of the five RM-ODP viewpoints, i.e., the three viewpoints featured in ICA’s formal model (Enterprise, Information, and Computation) and the other two viewpoints that make up the RM-ODP (Engineering and Technology). The adapted ICA’s model proved adequate to describe SDI-Cemig. In addition, the case study may serve as an example of the specification and implementation of new SDIs, not only corporate ones, but also of public agencies at any hierarchical level.
Highlights
Geospatial data are those referenced in relation to locations on the Earth and are key to understand the space around, being essential to aid in an organization’s decision-making and planning
No known cases exist of the use of this model to specify corporate Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI). This way, this paper aims to assess the use of the three viewpoints of International Cartographic Association (ICA)’s model (Enterprise, Information and Computation) and the other two viewpoints that make up the Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP) (Engineering and Technology) to specify a corporate SDI using SDI-Cemig as a case study
This paper presented the use of ICA’s formal model, proposed based on the RM-ODP model, to specify a corporate SDI
Summary
Geospatial data are those referenced in relation to locations on the Earth and are key to understand the space around, being essential to aid in an organization’s decision-making and planning. In order to minimize such expenses, several initiatives have been proposed to enhance geospatial data usage and sharing, such as the concept of Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI). Nebert [2] defines an SDI as a collection of technologies, policies and institutional agreements that, by means of a stable and reliable environment, allows geospatial data and its documentation (metadata) to be stored and shared, besides allowing the discovery, visualization and assessment of such data. Harvey et al [3] consider the SDI “an evolutionary concept that aids in sharing geospatial data and geographic services among different users of a given spatial community.”. A federation, according to those authors, is a set of communities
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