Presented at Open Seminar on SDI in Asia and the Pacific Region

The important need to manage and utilise the spatial data assets of a country is driving the development of Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI). Many countries believe that they can benefit both economically and environmentally from better management of their spatial data assets by taking a perspective that starts at a local level and proceeds through state, national and regional levels to global level. This has resulted in the development of SDI concept at these levels with a strong hierarchical relationship among different political/administrative levels of SDI concepts. SDI is fundamentally about facilitation and coordination of the exchange and sharing of spatial data between stakeholders from different jurisdictional levels in the spatial data community. Understanding of its role and nature are important to the acceptance of the concept and its alignment with spatial industry objectives. The aim of this paper is to discuss the nature and concept of SDI hierarchy, which have helped to build understanding about the importance of the relationships within different levels of SDIs to support the interactions and partnerships of the spatial data communities. Moreover, the paper will highlight the future direction of SDIs. It is argued that by better understanding the future direction of SDIs, any SDI development can gain support from a wider community of both government and non-government data users and providers