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SDI: Geospatial standards in action; a South African experience

Some facts about the South African geographic information community. A (relatively) small geographic information community e.g. many municipalities do not currently use a GISSeveral key spatial data sets created on a national basis: these are increasingly being used in combination with own" datas

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SDI: Geospatial standards in action; a South African experience

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    1. SDI Workshop - Africa GIS '01 7.11.2001 1 SDI: Geospatial standards in action; a South African experience Liz Gavin ISLinkup, Pretoria, South Africa Liz.gavin@islinkup.co.za

    2. Some facts about the South African geographic information community A (relatively) small geographic information community e.g. many municipalities do not currently use a GIS Several key spatial data sets created on a national basis: these are increasingly being used in combination with own dataset

    3. Developing SDI in South Africa Early 1990s: Attempt to develop a National Land Information System (NLIS) by the Department of Land Affairs Development hampered by lack of resourcing and vision 1997: Restructuring of the staff component of the National Mapping Agency and Cadastral Surveys to liberate resources dedicated to SDI development through the National Spatial Information Framework (NSIF)

    4. Components of the NSIF Components needed as identified through workshop in February 1998: A policy framework Institutional arrangements Data standards Metadata

    5. The standards component NSIF Standards Task Team established to identify and prioritise standards needed to avoid duplication and ensure that disparate data could be integrated readily South African Bureau of Standards (SABS) sub-committee SC71E established in 1999 to deal with geographic information Partial support from SABS for South Africa participation in the ISO technical committee for geographic information/geomatics, TC211

    6. The standards component Agreement that national standards should be developed within the framework of international standards National standards currently under development: A feature catalogue / data dictionary Metadata Unique identifiers for features in core data sets Land cover classification scheme

    7. Perceptions concerning standards A belief that standards are imposed by Someone Else A belief that SA must standardize for economic reasons A belief that we cant standardize Standards must be simple Standards must be sufficiently complex to cater for my special needs Expectation of highly detailed standards: e.g. snapping tolerances, symbols used to portray features

    8. Metadata standardization Pre-1997: much talk about metadata within GI community, but not much done about it 1998: set up FGDC-type clearinghouse as part of NSIF called the SDDF - Spatial Data Discovery Facility go to SDDF from http://www.nsif.org.za Built on prior private sector initiative

    9. Metadata (contd) Provided tools for capturing metadata to minimum FGDC content standard: Web-based tool Metalite: for use on stand-alone PC Visits to every government department (and other organisations in the private sector) to demonstrate the clearinghouse, elicit metadata capture and publishing and assess spatial data needs to inform definition of spatial data sets

    10. Metadata (contd) Later: additional interfaces provided to interrogate metadata database tool developed to capture more than minimum FDGC on request by GI community 2001: close to 3 000 metadata records available through the NSIF clearinghouse steady increase in use of clearinghouse: weekly average of 251 visits (636 hits) per week over period October 2000 - January 2001

    11. Metadata into the future Create 3 levels to SAs metadata standard (profiles of the ISO standard): discovery level, which will be a subset of the evaluation level, which will be a subset of the application level Provide tools to facilitate the standardized capture of metadata

    12. Digression: provision of datasets via the web Metadata is for the techies: some people want an SDI programme to deliver data to them, without being aware of the metadata Provision of access to core/framework data sets via the NSIF web-site (see the Framework Dataset Viewer from http://www.nsif.org.za )

    13. Concluding remarks Progress does get made but be prepared to wait! Its necessary to make compliance with standards as easy as possible i.e. provide people with the tools to enable them to comply with standards

    14. Concluding remarks (contd) Communicate, communicate and Communicate some more At times there may be a need to balance the need to achieve consensus before taking action with acting first to produce something tangible, in order to stimulate consensus (Tip of the hour: call this pilotting or producing a demonstrator)

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