Dominican spatial data infrastructure : strategies for development & governance

Abstract

SDI is the framework the permits the efficient and flexible use of spatial data, it provides the institutional and technical foundation to facilitate spatial data discovery, evaluation and applications. The implementation of a SDI is complex and costly and because of this, countries (especially developing countries) don`t have the luxury of falling on its implementation. A deep study on best practices and their adaptation to a country characteristics most be done to secure its success. This study analyses the cases of the United States, the European Community and the United Nations to obtain the best practices because of their importance to the world of SDI. The three cases present different way to achieve the goal of a SDI, but they have lots of similarities on how standards should be chosen, how metadata should be treated, who owns the data and how important sharing of the data is. After analyzing each case, this study proceed to analyze the market for a SDI in the Dominican Republic with a PEST analysis and then a SWOT analysis to identify the internal and external factors that can affect the success of a Dominican SDI. A cross analysis to develop strategies obtain from the SWOT is done and finally a structure for a Dominican SDI is propose.

Key words: SDI, Spatial Data Infrastructure, development, governance, strategy