Abstract
During the last decade, the production of geospatial information has increased considerably; however, managing and sharing this information has become increasingly difficult for the organizations that produce it, because it comes from different data sources and has a wide variety of users. In this sense, to have a better use of geospatial information, several countries have developed national spatial data infrastructures (SDIs) to improve access, visualization, and integration of their data and in turn, have the need to cooperate with other countries to develop regional SDIs, which allow better decision making with regional impact. However, its design and development plan requires, as a starting point, to knowing the level of development of the national SDIs to identify the strengths and gaps that exist in the region. This document presents the methodology developed and the results obtained from the evaluation of the status of implementation of the SDI components in each of the member countries of the Regional Committee of United Nations on Global Geospatial Information Management for the Americas (UN-GGIM: Americas), which will contribute to the equal development of SDIs in an integrated and collaborative way in the Americas.
Highlights
In the last decades, the use of geospatial information in decision making has reached a very important role, and several organizations have generated a large amount of geospatial data using different data sources
The Human Resources component holds the best performance rate in the region. This is related to the fact that in 86% of the Member States, the personnel in charge of the development of the spatial data infrastructures (SDIs) received training in topics related to geospatial information; that in 100% of the Member States, there are national academic centers that provide training in topics related to the development of geospatial information; and in 63% of the Members States, the SDI development team provides training on the subject to other organizations, which influences the fact that more personnel at the national level become familiar with the term and with the components that must be considered to develop an SDI
The lack in the implementation of a national SDI indicates that there is no organization and coordination between the geospatial information-generating institutions, which regularly leads to duplication of data, unnecessary production expenses, and inefficient use of the resources available
Summary
The use of geospatial information in decision making has reached a very important role, and several organizations have generated a large amount of geospatial data using different data sources. The appearance of spatial data infrastructures ( referred to as SDIs) is related to the solutions to the challenges in the handling of large volumes of geospatial data, since their implementation allows one to manage, integrate, discover, visualize, access, exchange, and effectively analyze the geospatial information produced by different organizations [2]. The document begins with the conceptual revision of an SDI, including the importance of its development, the description of its components, the importance of developing a regional SDI, and the role of UN-GGIM: Americas in the development of the SDI for the region of the Americas It continues with the presentation of the methodology used for the evaluating of the current state of national SDIs in the Americas, which consists on the application of a survey, the development of a mechanism to synthesize its results, design of a performance indicator, and the development of an interactive platform. We discuss the regional results for each components of an SDI and the conclusions are presented
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