What does it take to be spatially enabled?

By Clarice Africa | 25 May 2011 | Permanent link | 1 comment

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are gaining popularly in today’s government masterplanning. This is not surprising as information, when presented on maps, becomes much more powerful and useful for situational awareness and decision making.

Therefore we often see governments striving to make their countries ‘spatially enabled’. While there is no doubt about the benefits such enablement can bring, it is also very clear that simply having the technologies is not enough for maximising GIS’s potential. So what else needs to be done?

A particular question I have asked many prominent government GIS planners is: “What does it take for a country to be spatially enabled”? And oftentimes, I ‘d get a long pause, followed by a grin, then a light chuckle – apparently, they don’t know where to start. It is, after all, quite a difficult question. So what do we mean when we say “Spatially Enabled”?

According to prominent academics such as Dr Abbas Rajabifard of University of Melbourne, a society or a government can be considered as spatially enabled when location and spatial information are regarded as common goods made available to citizens and businesses to encourage creativity and innovation.

Basically, spatial enablement uses the concept of place and location to organise information and processes and it is now a ubiquitous part of e-Government and broader government ICT strategies. So back to my question, “What does it take for a country to be spatially enabled”? – is it technological resource, international standards, or human resource? The list would go on, and I’m positive readers of this blog could add their take on what should be included here as well.

I was able to talk to some top-calibre public sector officials recently and they were able to share very interesting insights on what it takes to be spatially enabled – insights I’ve found quite handy in understanding the intricate workings of GIS as applied in public sector organisations.

“Spatial enablement starts with spatial literacy”

For Dr Chaowalit Silapathong, Director of the Geo-Informatics office at the Geo-Informatics and Space Technology Development Agency (GISTDA) of Thailand, spatial enablement requires a large part of its citizenry to be spatially literate.

Dr Silapathong also mentioned that a country will have to be fully convinced of NSDI (National Spatial Data Infrastructure) initiatives and would have to make full commitment of its resources in support of the NSDI development (the resources include, but are not limited to human resource, technological resource, national endowments, political and cultural resource, financial resource, etc.).

“Finally, I think, a spatially enabled country will begin to emerge when the NSDI is well underway and implemented following best practice guidelines and in accordance with the national vision and goal set out in advance to cover all sectors and all levels of the government, from national down to provincial, district, and municipalities”.

According to Dr Silapathong, if the final phase is passed, then a country should at least be at some point of being spatially enabled.

“To be a partially or fully enabled country is not easy to judge because there is still a need to come up with some reliable and acceptable means to gauge this. For some countries, barely passing the demarcation line is good enough, but to others it may need to be well beyond that line. It depends on the background of the country involved,” he said.

“A conducive environment for sharing spatial data”

For Paul Ng, Chief Land Surveyor of the Land Information Centre, Hong Kong Lands Department, it is imperative that conducive policies regarding the collection, exchange and dissemination of geospatial data are developed – such as a comprehensive Spatial Data Infrastructure and a set of standards. Ng added that there should be sufficient resources to collect and update reliable geographic information. “To do that it requires the availability of GIS software and database software at an affordable cost,” he says.

In addition, Ng said that there is also a need for user friendly and intuitive platforms and applications for the general public to access and discover geospatial data conveniently.

“Finally, it requires investment in human capital to make use of geospatial information and to apply related GIS and IT technologies”

“There should also be good regulations and arrangement to protect the privacy of people in aspects of revealing and tracking the locations of people by individuals or by institutions, no matter public or private,” he said.

No international Geospatial standards = No spatial enablement

For Ben Searle, General Manager of the Australian Government Office of Spatial Data Management, first and foremost, it requires a key understanding on the senior level of the government of the value and benefit of spatial enablement.

“It also requires appropriate skill sets and an appropriate governance framework so that people operate within a framework established to understand where data is”.

Searle added that there’s a clear linkage between Geospatial standards and spatial enablement. “ The international geospatial standards are crucial for any spatial enablement and I don’t think you can have proper spatial enablement unless you have appropriate standards, if you don’t have standards you won’t have interoperability, you can’t share information - standards really are mechanisms by which spatial infrastructures are built,” he said.

In the mid-19th century, John Snow, a British physician plotted individual cases of cholera on a map during an outbreak of the disease in London. This enabled him to trace the source of the outbreak – a contaminated well.

Given that example, it is apparent that the use of GIS has revolutionised over the years and has now become a ubiquitous part of e-Government and broader government ICT strategies, and while it may be difficult to gauge a country’s course or stage of “spatial enablement” It has to start from somewhere right? – Well for me, the initial stage of spatial enablement starts with acknowledging its potential and acting upon it.

GIS has a lot of potential to do a lot of things – however that potential remains only an idea, a force, which is inactive and useless unless great work is done in order to stimulate it into motion. It is not just a map, but an essential ingredient in attaining overall situational awareness critical in decision making – think of disaster preparedness, public health, urban planning, and resource management, how would these sectors fare without GIS?

Ultimately we are not making a country spatially enabled just for the sake of making it spatially enabled. It is the benefits that this enablement brings to the society as well as its individual citizens that matter.