SDI to facilitate a spatially enabled society

The ability of society to meet sustainable development objectives is a complex and temporal process involving multiple stakeholders. This can be facilitated through the development of a spatially enabled society, where location and spatial information are regarded as common goods made available to citizens and businesses to encourage creativity and product development. This requires data and services to be accessible and accurate, well-maintained and sufficiently reliable for use by the majority of society which is not spatially aware. With this in mind, many countries are developing Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) to improve access, sharing and integration of spatial data and services, however, there are still many issues and challenges which need to be overcome in order to have a fully functioning SDI. For example, an integration mechanism, cooperation between the private, public and academic sectors and a development framework are essential to form the information infrastructure required to support a spatially enabled society. This paper aims to introduce and discuss various challenges and issues associated in building a spatially enabled society. It also discusses the central role that an SDI plays in facilitating this as the enabling platform. This includes aspects of designing, creating and processes involved in development and governance of an SDI platform