Geographic Information Management for the Canadian Digital Economy

If Canada is to build a world–class digital infrastructure as proposed in Improving Canada's Digital Advantage then location should be used to help create it. The absence of explicit consideration of location is a significant gap in the proposed strategy. Location is assuming increasing importance in the digital era and the management of geographic information is a priority. Over 80% of existing digital databases have a locational component. "Everything is somewhere" and location can be used as an integrator for both quantitative and qualitative information. Society is increasingly using location–based information in daily life including GPS and various Internet mapping programs. Governments are using location or place in planning and budgeting. For example, in August 2009 the Obama administration issued a memorandum entitled "Developing Effective Place Based Policies for FY 2011, M–09–28" (US Office of Management and Budget, 2009) which outlines the administration's policy and fiscal priorities and asks agencies to use place based programming in their budget requests for 2011.

Using location in planning by governments at all levels is not new as GIS (Geographical Information Systems) have been in use for some time and, more recently, Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) have emerged at the local, regional, national and international scales (Onsrud, 2007). Location is also important to the growing public participatory information infrastructures being built cooperatively by individual citizens through "crowd sourcing" activities such as Open Street Map. An SDI is "… the technology, policies, standards, human resources and related activities to acquire, process, distribute, use, maintain and preserve spatial data." (US Office of Management and Budget, 2002). By 2010 many nations were implementing SDIs to manage their spatial data. Canada has been in the forefront of such efforts through the GeoConnections Program and the Canada Geospatial Data Infrastructure and, at the time of writing, (June 2010) Natural Resources Canada is conducting a consultation on new directions for a National Mapping Strategy for Canada (Canadian Council on Geomatics, 2010). The Geomatics Industry Association of Canada has also proposed a National Geomatics Action Plan (GIAC, 2010).

The Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure and the infrastructure suggested in Improving Canada's Digital Advantage should be linked. The separation of the management of geographical data from the Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) mainstream is not unique to Canada. In Europe the impressive Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community (INSPIRE) initiative to manage geographic information is developing largely independent of the efforts related to the European Digital Agenda and this pattern is being repeated in numerous other countries. Geospatial data must be an integral part of the emerging ubiquitous ICT environment, not a stand–alone system.

There are barriers to the sharing and integration of data. The technical barriers have largely been overcome but the socio–economic, cultural and institutional barriers are much more persistent. If these are not addressed then improving Canada's digital advantage may prove to be illusionary. Good technical solutions to the interoperability of data sets exist but if the stewards of the datasets are not prepared to share their data in the first place then little can be achieved. The Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) Data Sharing Task Force led by the Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA) has considered these among other issues in a comprehensive fashion (Uhlir, 2009; GEOSS, 2010). In Canada institutional problems pose special challenges for data sharing in addition to issues such as privacy and confidentiality.

Geographic information and socio–economic information should be more effectively linked. Recently the United Nations has identified this as a major challenge for geographic information management (UN, 2010) and has appointed a group of international experts to address this question.

In the emerging digital economy the general public is increasingly becoming a provider of data through a variety of participatory information infrastructures. We should ensure that Canada's digital infrastructure includes these efforts?