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CSC468 Geographical Information System | Prithivi Narayan Campus | Dev Timilsina
Unit 6: Introduction to Spatial Data Infrastructure

Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) is defined as a framework of policies, institutional
arrangements, technologies, data, and people that enables the sharing and effective
usage of geographic information by standardizing formats and protocols for access and
interoperability.
We can define an SDI (Spatial Data Infrastructure) as a computer network system

composed by a group of resources (catalogues, servers, programs, data, applications,
Web Pages, and so on) that manage the Geographic Information such as maps,
orthophotography, satellite images, location, etc. They are available to download online.
This information supplies interoperability conditions (rules, specifications, protocols,
interfaces, etc.) that allow the user to download and use them, with only a web browser.
The term “Spatial Data Infrastructure” (SDI) is often used to denote the relevant base
collection of technologies, policies and institutional arrangements that facilitate the
availability of and access to spatial data. The SDI provides a basis for spatial data
discovery, evaluation, and application for users and providers within all levels of
government, the commercial sector, the non-profit sector, academia and by citizens in
general.
Spatial data infrastructure encompasses the resources, systems, network linkages,

standards and institutional issues involved from many different sources in delivering geo-
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spatially related information to the widest possible group of potential users. Also, adopting
this definition with general definition of infrastructures, it could be concluded that SDI has
following characteristics:
➢ Is a set of base capabilities;

➢ Is a general comprehensive system;
➢ Has multiple effective aspects in ICT utilization;
➢ Includes some stable and dynamic physical components;
➢ Provides important, fundamental and irreplaceable services.
An IDE (Integrated development environment) allows to:
➢ Search for the Geographic Information available for a geographic area, including
the format, the form to access to it, and the metadata.
➢ Visualize and overlapping, maps, orthophotography, DTM, any type of geographic
data from different organizations, with different reference system defined, in
different formats and heterogeneous properties.
➢ Search for a concrete geographic feature, by its name and where it is located within
the cartography.
➢ Access the geographic features in a standard format, as well as its attributes
coordinates, topology and geometry.
➢ Carry out basic analysis, such as routing, profile calculations a surface analysis.
➢ Carry out transformations from one data model to another one, if both data are
described in a normalized form.
➢ Download the data needed to carry out a powerful analysis in a GIS desktop
software.
We can say that SDIs were born in 1994, from the Executive Order 12906, of United
States. From then, all the English-speaking countries followed this process of developing
and displaying Geographic Information on Internet. Canada, Australia and New Zealand
developed new SDIs.
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Components of SDI
The SDI provides a basis for spatial data discovery, evaluation, and application for users
and providers within all levels of government, the commercial sector, the non-profit sector,
academia and by citizens in general.” The basic components of SDI are as follows:
1. Standards
2. Framework
3. Geo-data
4. Metadata
5. Clearing House
Clearinghouse
A (spatial data) clearinghouse is a distributed network of spatial data producers,

managers and users that are linked electronically together. It is a system of software and
institutions that are to facilitate the discovery, evolution and downloading of digital spatial
data and provides means to inventory, document and data sharing. The clearinghouse
concept is a useful one in building a Geographic Information Infrastructure (GII). The
objective is to minimize unnecessary duplication of effort for data capture, and to
maximize the benefit of geographic information sharing. Data providers nowadays are
fully aware of the importance of advertising and making available their metadata
describing their databases, to facilitate the use of their products. This explains the current
level of activity of building these clearinghouses.
❖ Institutional view
People and infrastructure to facilitate discovery of who has what geographic information.
❖ Technical view
A set of information services that use hardware, software, and telecommunications
networks provide searchable access to information. Some roles of Clearing house are.
➢ Publication of metadata
➢ Distributed service to locate geospatial data based on their characteristics
expressed in metadata
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➢ Clearinghouse allows someone to pose a query of all or a portion of the ‘metadata

network’ in a single session. Like a spatial Google/AltaVista
How does a clearinghouse work?

A clearinghouse allows data providers to register their geographic data sets, the quality
of these data and also the instructions for accessing them. Each data provider provides
an electronic description of each spatial data set. In addition, the provider may also
provide access to the spatial data set itself. The clearinghouse thus functions as a detailed
catalogue service with support for links to spatial data and browsing capabilities. The data
described in the clearinghouse may be located at the site of the data producers or at sites
of designated data disseminators located elsewhere in the country. Obviously, computer
network facilitates are the key factors to success.
Search Criteria
❖ Geographic Coordinates
➢ place names
➢ bounding rectangle coordinates
➢ draw bounding box on interactive map
❖ Time
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➢ before, after and equal to

❖ Full / Field Text
➢ full text
➢ fielded search - (14 metadata fields)
❖ Data Sources
➢ all registered nodes
➢ selected nodes
Metadata Concepts and functionality
Metadata is defined as background information that describes the content, quality,

condition and other appropriate characteristics of the data. So, metadata is a simple
mechanism to inform others of the existence of the data sets, their purpose and scope.
In essence metadata answer who, what, when, where, why and how questions (WH
Questions) about all facets of the data made available. Metadata can be used internally
be the data provider to monitor the status of data sets, and externally to advertise to
potential users through a national clearinghouse. Metadata are important in the
production of a digital spatial data clearinghouse, where potential users can search for
the data, they need.
Metadata is the additional information about the data sets, which describes content,
quality, condition and other characteristics of the data.
➢ It provides a way to inform the potential users about the data sets, their purpose and
scope.
➢ It is used internally by the data provider to monitor the status of the data sets.
➢ It is used externally to advertise to the potential users through a national clearing
house.
➢ A standard is defined for the design of the metadata.
➢ Metadata must be managed properly to keep it up-to-date.
Roles of metadata:
Applicability: information needed to determine the data sets that exists for a
geographic location,
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Fitness for use: information needed to determine whether a data set meets a
specified need,
Access: information needed to acquire an identified data set,
Transfer: information needed to process and use a data set,
Administration: information needed to document the status of existing data (data
model, quality, completeness, temporal validity etc…) to define internal policy for
update operations from different data sources.
Metadata Formats
• Metadata from ISO 19115 can be expressed in XML referencing ISO 19139 for
exchange
• XML metadata may include reference to an XML Style Sheet (XSL) to present the
XML data in a browser
• Metadata format may also be presented by requesting the HTML format
• Metadata can also be converted to an X-HTML format that can be parsed and
presented
Metadata management & update
Just like ordinary data, metadata has to be kept up-to-date. The main concerns in
metadata management include what to represent, how to represent, how to capture and
how to use it; and all these depend on the purpose of metadata; For internal (data
provider) use, we will refer to local metadata which contains the detailed information
about data sets stored on local hardware and managed by the data provider. For external
use we refer to global metadata which contains a short description of the data sets (an
abstraction of local metadata) as advertised in the clearinghouse to allow users to find
relevant data efficiently. Data providers should register their data holding with the
clearinghouse. Whenever changes occur in their data, each data provider reports the
changes to the clearing authority. Updating the global metadata is the responsibility
of clearinghouse.
Data sharing and related problems
Geographic data exchange and sharing means the flow of digital data from one
information system to the other. Advances in technology, data handling and data
communication allow the user to think of the possibility of finding and accessing data that
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has been collected by different data providers. Their objective is to minimize the
duplication of effort in spatial data collection and processing. Data sharing problems
which can be viewed as critical factors in SDI can be briefly described as follows:
1. Data standards: It refers to an agreed upon way of representing data in a system in
terms of content, type and format. Exchange of data between databases is difficult it they
support different data standards or different query language. The development of
common data architecture and the support for a single data exchange format, commonly
known as standard for data exchange may provide a sound basis for data sharing.
Examples of these standards are the DIGEST (Digital Geographic Information Exchange
Standard) Spatial Data Transfer Standard (SDTS) etc...
2. Heterogeneity: it means being different in kind, quality and character. Spatial data
may exist in a variety of locations, are possibly managed by a variety of database
systems, were collected for different purposes and by different methods, and are stored
in different structures. This brings about all kinds of inconsistency among these data sets
(heterogeneity) and creates many problems when data is shared.
3. Communication problems: with advances in computer network communication and
related technology, locating relevant information in a network of distributed information
sources has become more important recently. The question is which communication
technology is the best suitable for transfer of huge amounts of spatial data in a secure
and reliable way. Efficient tools and communication protocols are necessary to provide
search browse and delivery mechanisms.
4. Institutional and Economic problems: these problems arise in the absence of policy
concerning pricing, copyright, privacy, responsibility, conformity with standards, data
quality etc. resolving these problems is essential to create the right environment for data
sharing.
System Architecture for SDI Interoperability
An infrastructure is a kind of organization, which is the main basis for other organizing
activity developments, contributes necessary and different activities in sustainable
development. In this process new and adoptive nature is created for each activity,
preserving their usual specification through strategies and policies injection and
integration assuring their effectiveness. Tracing SDI trend, after one decade of its
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emergence (1990s), its concepts have been fulfilled considerably. Balancing the GI
(Geographic Information) generation and utilization concentration is the main evolution
resulted new SDI definitions as follow:
➢ Product-based model, which represents one of the main aims of an SDI
development initiative, can be used to link existing and upcoming databases of the
respective political/administrative levels of the community.
➢ Process-based model, which presents one of the other main aims of an SDI
development initiative, defining a framework to facilitate the management of
information assets.
Also, a hierarchical structure is defined for SDI, which comes from especial nature of
geo-spatial data as they depend on scale and application. Regarding this structure, SDI
treats in a pyramid, which its base (corporate level) is very similar to current foundation
used for desktop GIS applications development and by its promotion to the peak, SDI
converts to a global infrastructure (Figure below).
Considering this structure, the following points could be illustrated:

➢ From each level we could navigate to its upper and lower levels.
➢ Each lower level provides the building blocks of upper levels.
➢ Each upper-level transfers its overall definitions and backgrounds (strategy, policy)
to lower level;
➢ The levels relationship fastens as they come closer.
These specifications and tangibility of this structure for societies, has clarified and
simplified SDI concepts and developments more.
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Geographic Information for policy making
Geographic Information is needed in many policies domains Many stakeholders and

organizations produce spatial datasets but there is..
➢ Lack of reference and authentic data
➢ Difficult to obtain spatial data;
• Not always accessible
• Uneasy process to obtain and process
• Often expensive
➢ Gaps in availability of spatial data and duplication of efforts
• Sometimes low quality
➢ Spatial data not harmonized;
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• Difficulty to use across entities

• Impossibility to process or combine with data from other countries
➢ Difficult to interpret and understand;
• Often not documented
Common Issues:
➢ A large variety of formats exist
➢ Many geographical gaps still remain
➢ Reference systems are not harmonized
➢ Many data sources are not consistent
➢ Scales are not compatible
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➢ All data are not interoperable

➢ Costs and access restrictions
Client Server Architecture
The SDI of the coastal zone at Heraklion accommodates a series of geospatial data layers
(Shapefiles and GeoTiff images) collected based on the user and application needs as
regards to the coastal management. The SDI also introduces geospatial mashups
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provided by other servers on the web (e.g., Google Maps, NASA JPL Portal Nasa’s WMS,
Integrated CEOS European Data Server). The architecture, the software systems and the
specifications adopted are shown in Figure 1. The architecture is compatible with the
proposal for GeoFOSS SDI (Ticheler 2007, OSGeo) and follows the conceptual three-tier
architecture for SDI’s (Evans 2003). At the bottom layer, reside the SDI databases and
database management systems. The geospatial layers are inserted into
Postgresql/PostGIS in order to achieve a more efficient data management. In the middle
layer (middleware) reside all the services that assist the accessibility to the data
repositories. This SDI has two main servers, i.e., the Map Server and the Catalog Server.
These two servers will serve the geospatial content on the web based on standard
interfaces (e.g., WMS, WFS, WCS, ISO 19115/139) to facilitate the worldwide access to
and the use of online geospatial data. At the top layer (the client) reside the users and
applications. The access to the SDI geospatial content is possible through either a
desktop or a web client.
Phase 1: Preparation of the geospatial layers. This Phase is focused on the
preparation of the geospatial layers collected for the coastal zone of Heraklion.
Specifically, appropriate transformations are carried out in order to insert the geospatial
layers at the bottom layer of the coastal SDI
Phase 2: Development of the WMS, WFS and WCS Servers. In this Phase the Map
Server has been set up. The map files have been edited and appropriate parameters
have been inserted in order to serve geospatial data residing at the bottom SDI layer into
the application layer using OGC specifications, i.e, WMS, WFS, and WCS. Geospatial
data can then be retrieved and visualized by end users in various formats (e.g., PGN,
JPG and GML).
Phase 3: Development of the Web Client Applications. This Phase is focused on the
generation of user-friendly interfaces to the SDI geospatial content through the web. The
web client applications are connected with the geospatial layers provided by other servers
(e.g., Google Maps, NASA JPL Portal Nasa’s WMS, Integrated CEOS European Data
Server – Mashups). Their functionality includes the browsing/ visualization of the SDI
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geospatial layers and the retrieval/discovery of information based on relatively simple

geospatial analysis operations.
Phase 4: Development of the Catalog Server. In this Phase, the catalog server for the
geospatial layers accommodated in the coastal SDI has been set up. Appropriate
metadata items have been generated and coded based on internationally accepted
specifications (ISO 19115/139).
THE WMS, WFS, WCS AND KML SERVERS
The web page consists of four main sections. Each

section is devoted to one server:
1. The Web Map Server (WMS) section serves all

vector layers (Shapefiles) of the SDI. The web page
provides a link to the capabilities document
(GetCapabilities) and a set of links to the actual maps
(as images) as served by the WMS (GetMap).
2. The Web Feature Service (WFS) section provides

the same SDI layers as in WMS section. The web page
provides a link to the WFS capabilities document
(GetCapabilities) and a set of links to the actual layers
(as features in GML) of the WFS (GetFeature - GML).
3. The Web Coverage Server (WCS) section provides

the raster (GeoTiff) layers of the SDI. Similarly to the WMS and WFS sections the end
user is provided a link (URL request) to the WCS cabalilities document (GetCapabilities)
and a set of links to the actual images of the WCS (GetMap).
4. The Keyhole Markup Language (KML) section provides the KML (or KMZ, i.e., zipped
KML) files of the SDI geospatial layers. These layers are generated using the ogr2ogr
utility provided in GDAL/OGR Geospatial Library (OSGeo). The end user may download
these layers and visualize them either in Google Earth (Figure 3) or on top of Google
Maps using Google Maps API
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Legal Aspects of SDI
Legal Aspects IS the role of the law on all aspects of data ownership and management.
Throughout the course, we need to focus on legal ethics, court procedures, torts,
contracts, consumer law, property law, employment law, environmental law, and
international law.
Legal aspects associated with SDI-implementation
➢ Liability (Responsibility)
➢ Accessibility
➢ Privacy
➢ Discrimination to buyers
➢ Copyright
➢ Selling to third parties (Forbidden by contracts/Royalties)
➢ Commercialization of public information
Liability: The state of being legally bound or obligated, as to make any loss or damage
that occurs in a transaction Liability for incomplete or incorrect geoinformation.
Accessibility:
➢ Secrets
➢ Lack of capacity
➢ Policy: passive accessibility
➢ Technology
➢ Standardization
➢ Metadata systems
Accessibility:
➢ Secrets
➢ Lack of capacity
➢ Policy: passive accessibility
➢ Technology
➢ Standardization
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➢ Metadata systems
Discrimination of buyers
➢ Government
➢ Private enterprises
➢ Consumers
Copyright
➢ Authenticity (Genuine, Real, legally attested or executed)

➢ Completeness
Introduction Case SDI-Policy Assignment Address and access policy issues that (may)
influence the function of the Utopian SDI, both positively and negatively. What are the
potential measures or countermeasures regarding these policy issues that can secure a
proper functioning of a created SDI?
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CSC468 Geographical Information System | Prithivi Narayan Campus | Dev Timilsina

Unit 6: Introduction to Spatial Data Infrastructure

We can define an SDI (Spatial Data Infrastructure) as a computer network system

Spatial data infrastructure encompasses the resources, systems, network linkages,

➢ Is a set of base capabilities;

An IDE (Integrated development environment) allows to:

A (spatial data) clearinghouse is a distributed network of spatial data producers,

➢ Clearinghouse allows someone to pose a query of all or a portion of the ‘metadata

How does a clearinghouse work?

➢ before, after and equal to

Metadata Concepts and functionality

Metadata is defined as background information that describes the content, quality,

Considering this structure, the following points could be illustrated:

Geographic Information for policy making

Geographic Information is needed in many policies domains Many stakeholders and

• Difficulty to use across entities

➢ All data are not interoperable

geospatial layers and the retrieval/discovery of information based on relatively simple

THE WMS, WFS, WCS AND KML SERVERS

The web page consists of four main sections. Each

1. The Web Map Server (WMS) section serves all

2. The Web Feature Service (WFS) section provides

3. The Web Coverage Server (WCS) section provides

Legal Aspects of SDI

Legal aspects associated with SDI-implementation

➢ Authenticity (Genuine, Real, legally attested or executed)

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