Database Reference
In-Depth Information
that the technologists do not always understand the needs of the real end user. This is
no different from many other industries (and we use industry in the widest sense), but
neither does it excuse it. It is equally important to recognize these intermediate users
and the value that they bring, something that applies not only to intermediate users
but also to those responsible for creating the raw GI and the infrastructures.
If we revisit our three main uses, then we can also see some general patterns
when we map these uses to the types of people carrying out the use cases. Those
who use GIS tend to be professionals and function centric; that is, because they are
interested in performing often-complex GI analysis, their interests are driven by the
functionality that can be supported and the quality of the data that they are using.
They mainly come from government, large industry, specialist consultancies, and
software houses. This group would strongly associate itself with GI and recognize it
as a distinct concept.
Those who use GI to integrate data may fall into a number of different groups
and will include many from the GI community; those with an interest in non-geom-
etry-related activities such as commercial companies that link data through address
matching; and those who wish to build mashups, whether governmental, commer-
cial, or private. These groups are quite varied in nature; some may closely associate
with GIS, and others may barely recognize GI as a distinct thing.
Those creating GI and the related infrastructures tend to fall into distinct groups:
•
Government agencies and usually large commercial companies interested
in creating high-quality GI assets; most typically, these are national or
regional government agencies collecting or creating information on map-
ping, environmental, transportation, and so on, along with commercial
companies such as NAVTECH. In this group, there is a clear interest in
quality; therefore, standards are seen as important. This group is neverthe-
less more quality centric than standards centric.
•
Those interested in creating SDIs or similar infrastructures. This group
is dominated by governments and is particularly standards centric. Here,
standards are seen as the foundation of an infrastructure through the man-
date of particular ways of structuring and communicating data. Standards
are employed to achieve interoperability by removing diversity and stan-
dardizing both structure (syntax) and meaning (semantics). Outside this
group, there are those such as Internet search companies like Google and
Microsoft interested in supporting services for their users. Here, the driver
is not standards but the need to attract users; hence, innovation and usability
become the main drivers.
•
Last, there are those, such as the authors of OpenStreetMap, interested in
creating freely available GI of a quality that makes it suitable for use in
mashups. The motivations for this group are many and varied and range
from altruism to a general distrust of data from commercial or governmen-
tal sources. Indeed, there is frequently a tension between contributors of
volunteered geographic information (VGI) and those working for govern-
ment mapping agencies and other parts of government responsible for the
creation of GI, with each mistrusting the motives and abilities of the other.
