The Cultural Aspects of Sharing and Dynamic Partnerships within an SDI Hierarchy

The need to create multi-participant, decision-supported environments to address the issues of sustainable development and improving the quality of life creates a growing need to organise data across disciplines and organisations through different forms of spatial data infrastructure (SDI). This infrastructure is fundamentally a concept about facilitation and coordination of the exchange and sharing of spatial data between stakeholders from different jurisdictional levels in the spatial data community. The concept is well explained as an integrated, multilevelled hierarchy of interconnected SDIs based on partnerships at corporate, local, state/provincial, national, regional (multi-national) and global (GSDI) levels. The creation of such an infrastructure and understanding the role of dynamic partnerships within an SDI hierarchy are essential to develop any SDI initiative. This paper reviews..