Since the 1960s, Geographic Information and spatial data started to play an important role in the geography domain (Foley, 2009) thanks to GIS developments and rapid advances in computational technologies. Indeed, GI and spatial data may be considered as fundamental in providing accurate information on cultural, social and natural resources, as well as, in describing patterns on the Earth surface (Maguire and Longley, 2005). Currently, GI is collected, processed and used for government, private sector and recreational uses, becoming a consumer good worldwide and representing a strategic resource, inasmuch the developed societies are becoming ever more spatially enabled (Williamson et al., 2004). In the 1980s, a number of national mapping and surveying agencies started to develop strategies and programs to facilitate the access to GI that were collected and used in practice. These strategies led toward the implementation of ad-hoc systems aimed to grant an easier access to databases of spatial data and geographic information, namely SDI.
The origin of the term SDI can be traced back to 1993, when the US National Research Council systems used the acronym to depict systems able to provide a standardized access to GI among other features (Mapping Science Committee, 1993). In 1994, the President Clinton’s executive order 12906 (Executive Order 12906, 1994) established the development of a national SDI (NSDI) in the United States of America, and quickly fostered the diffusion of SDIs initiatives worldwide (Budhathoki et al., 2008). Indeed, several countries started the development of SDIs in order to ease the access and sharing of spatial information between stakeholders involved in spatial governance and planning, granting the efficient use of geographic information to support decision-making processes within national boundaries (Crompvoets et al. 2004).
Social Media Geographic Information (SMGI): opportunities for spatial planning and governance. 32 SDIs may be described as a set of policies, technologies and standards for easing the production, management and reuse of existent GI by spatial information users (Phillips et al., 1999), meanwhile reducing efforts and costs of dataset production through interoperability, sharing and easier access to geographic data (Davis Jr, 2009). This description is compliant with the one coined by the US Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC, 2004), which depicts SDIs as “the technology, policies, standards and human resources necessary to acquire, process, store, distribute and improve utilization of geospatial data”.
In spite of continuous advances in SDI development, since the mid 1990s, the implementation of these infrastructures experienced two different periods: first generation SDIs and second generation SDIs. The developments of first generation SDIs were mainly concerned on technical issues regarding the system architecture’s design and development in order to achieve specific purposes, such as: the geographic database completion and/or production, the economic development, the spatial government and the environmental sustainability (Masser, 1999). Each country involved in first generation SDIs initiatives promoted the SDI development based on national requirements and priorities, focusing more on the product, namely the spatial data, than on the real requirements of users and stakeholders. This product-centered vision was led by the national mapping agencies, namely the data producers, and limited de facto the private sector, civil society, and interested users involvement at large scale (Craglia and Annoni, 2007).
The transition towards the second generation SDI started in 2000s when the leading countries changed their development strategies toward a more process-oriented or process-based approach (Rajabifard et al., 2003). Indeed, the second generation SDI initiatives are characterized by the central role of stakeholders within society, and the driving force for development shifts from data production to data use and users requirements. The distinguishing technological signal of the second generation SDIs is the web services introduction, which exploit a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and act as fundamental components of the system in order to grant direct access to data and resources (Davis Jr, 2008), as well as, to satisfy the users requirements (Crompvoets et al., 2004) by means of added value services. Among these web services, the central role is played by the geoportal, which, as claimed by Tait (2005) represents “a web site considered to be an entry point to geographic contents on the web or, more simply, a web site where geographic content can be discovered”. Similarly, Maguire and Longley (2005) define a geoportal as “World Wide Web gateway that organizes content and services such as directories, search tools, community information, support resources, data and applications”. Therefore, a geoportal facilitates both the discovery of information through a repository of metadata, and the consequent access to these resources (Davis Jr, 2008) by making available to users a single entry point (Budhathoki et al., 2008). Important examples of geoportal may be found in the Geospatial One Stop (GOS) from the USA and in the
EU-Social Media Geographic Information (SMGI): opportunities for spatial planning and governance. 33 Geoportal, which is a component of the INSPIRE project implemented by the INSPIRE Directive (Directive 2007/2/EC).
The Directive (2007/2/EC) establishes the legal framework for setting up and operating an INfrastructure for SPatial InfoRmation in the European Community (INSPIRE), which takes advantage of the SDI already existing in the European member states. The purpose of the INSPIRE Directive is to support the formulation, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of Community environmental policies (Craglia and Annoni, 2007). The Directive came in force in 2007, and since 2010 many European countries passed legislation introducing the INSPIRE requirements into national and regional laws, leading to the development of National and Regional SDIs initiatives according to common data, technology, and shared standards (Campagna and Craglia, 2012). The key elements of INSPIRE are i) ‘metadata’ to describe existing resources, easing the search and the access to information, ii) ‘key spatial data themes and services’ to provide a common framework for SDIs initiatives, granting interoperability and harmonization of resources, iii) ‘network services and technologies’ to enable the discovery, viewing, transforming and downloading functionalities, iv) ‘agreements on sharing and access’ to define common policies in member states, v)
‘coordination and monitoring mechanism’ to report on the Directive implementation and to evaluate its impacts and vi) ‘process and procedures’ to put in action the implementation process of the infrastructure.
The INSPIRE Directive builds upon a participative and collaborative process among official representatives from all Member States and public and private experts in environmental policy, with the aim of overcome five major barriers affecting the EU development (Craglia and Annoni, 2007) defined as i) the inconsistent data collection, ii) the inadequate documentation, iii) the incompatible datasets, iv) the incompatible geographic information initiatives and v) the data sharing barriers. The collaborative efforts, put in action by the involved stakeholders, pursue the definition of a common legislative framework to coordinate member states’ SDIs initiatives according to a minimum set of common standards and processes. The final purposes leading the INSPIRE Infrastructure implementation (Craglia and Annoni, 2007) are the following:
1) the once collection and maintenance of spatial data across European countries;
2) the combination and reusability of spatial data from different European SDIs;
3) the sharing of spatial data between different levels of government;
4) the spatial data accessibility for extensive use into spatial and environmental governance;
5) the spatial data documentation, namely metadata catalogs, in order to expose data availability, fitness to purpose and conditions of use.
Social Media Geographic Information (SMGI): opportunities for spatial planning and governance. 34 The INSPIRE Infrastructure is enabling the public access and reuse of available A-GI according to common data, technology, and policy standards with beneficial impacts for public administration, developers and planning practitioners (Campagna and Craglia, 2012). In addition, it is slowly bringing innovations into the planning practice, inasmuch in many regions in Europe, the regional SDIs represent currently the de-jure technical platform for the development of regional and local planning processes, by means of supplied data and services (Campagna and Craglia, ibidem). The term ‘authoritative’ refers to spatial data of SDIs that are produced by mapping agencies, experts, professionals and organizations for a specific mission or program and are compliant to well-defined institutional or legal frameworks (Ball, 2010; Goodchild and Glennon, 2010). The A-GI provision by trained experts grants the compliance with specific requirements and quality procedures, ensuring, at the same time, high degrees of accuracy and quality standards (Goodchild and Glennon, 2010; Elwood et al., 2012). Moreover, the official nature of SDIs spatial data is guaranteed by metadata, which describe several characteristics of this information such as: provenance, content, quality, accuracy, authorship, conditions of use, to name few (Nogueras-Iso et al., 2004).
In Sardinia, the Sardinian Regional SDI (SRSDI), namely the Regional Geographic Information System or
“Sistema Informativo Territoriale Regionale – Infrastruttura di Dati Territoriali” (SITR-IDT) in italian, represents the technical platform to supply geographic data, services and technical resources to the public (Manigas et al., 2010). The SRSDI constitutes the regional geographic database wherein all Sardinian geospatial information are catalogued, maintained and made accessible according to the Legislative Decree 32/2010, which implements the INSPIRE Directive in Italy. Currently, the SRSDI performs a major role as official information system to support planning processes at the regional and the local level. In Chapter 6 and 7, spatial data from the SRSDI will be used and integrated with SMGI in several selected case studies in order to carry out analyses at the regional and the local scale in Sardinia.