Coastal Spatial Data Infrastructure as Part of National/Regional SDI

Roger A. Longhorn

IDG (UK) Ltd, EC Projects Office and School of Informatics, City University, London (UK)

Specification of national, regional and global spatial data infrastructures (SDI) has been underway for a decade, with varying degrees of success. At trans-national level, projects looking at regional SDI (RSDI) requirements began in 1995 in Europe (ESDI) and Asia-Pacific (PCGIAP) and in 2000 in the Americas (PC-IDEA), mainly in response to NSDI developments occurring in the nations within their regions. Global SDI discussions started in 1996 with the first GSDI conference in Bonn, Germany and the Global Mapping Project in 1997. Most attempts to create SDI at national level (NSDI) have yet to be fully implemented. At regional level, even less has been achieved in creating true infrastructure. Globally, the main focus has been on community building, consensus building, creating vision, defining overall strategy and goals.

One complication in specifying SDI is the nature of spatial information, i.e. information with an important location attribute, which is often said to represent 80% of all information held, especially at government level. The visionaries and designers of SDI must accommodate the widely varying information needs of highly diverse disciplines and sectors of society, business and government. Health epidemiologists are seldom interested in the same spatial data as geological surveyors, air traffic controllers or coastal zone managers. Yet an important overlap in jurisdiction and information needs may arise, e.g. when a potential health epidemic is generated by toxic chemical concentration in marine fauna later consumed by area residents. Then knowledge of the coastal zone flora and fauna, hydrography, nearby land use practices (industry and agriculture) and transport routes, fishing practices and zones all become intertwined.

How can we develop a comprehensive SDI specification without taking into consideration all such needs? The complexity of the interrelationships that exist between different types of spatial information is one of the reasons that countries have taken different routes to specify their SDI, ranging from strategies to visions to goals to detailed content (data and standards) and implementation plans (rules and regulations). Is it practical to develop SDI at national or regional (trans-national) levels in the same way that telecommunications or transport infrastructure is implemented? Is it possible or even desirable to attempt to specify SDI on a sector-by-sector basis, including for the coastal zone?

We all recognize that the coastal zone is a difficult physical area to manage, due to the inherent overlapping not only of physical geography and hydrography (offshore, near shore, shoreline, inshore) but also of institutions. Typically, many different local, national and regional government agencies are responsible for the different physical areas and uses of the coastal zone, e.g. fisheries, environment, agriculture, transport (inland and marine), urban planning, national mapping agency and the hydrographic service.

Because of these complex physical and institutional relationships, it is not possible to develop a coastal zone SDI (CSDI) in isolation from the broader NSDI for a nation or RSDI for a region. CSDI will necessarily be a subset of a more comprehensive NSDI because the coastal zone covers multiple physical and institutional spaces covered by the NSDI overall. It is important that those people and agencies with specific knowledge and experience of the coastal zone be an integral part of the NSDI or RSDI planning process.

Few nations have specified SDI for individual sectors such as the coastal zone. In the USA, a Coastal NSDI vision exists, based on four goals that relate to the USA NSDI (NOAA 2001). The CSDI initiative in the USA is led by the Coastal Services Centre of NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), supported at implementation level by the Federal Geographic Data Committee's Marine and Coastal Spatial Data Subcommittee (FGDC 2001). Yet a recent report from the US Commission on Ocean Policy (US CoOP 2002) led one commissioner to observe that one of the most shocking findings of the Commission was the tight connection between inland systems like development and agriculture to what have traditionally been designated as coastal areas. "The coastal zone is not a narrow band. It's the whole country."

Canada has proposed a Marine Geospatial Data Infrastructure initiative (MGDI) within the national Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure (CGDI) (Chopin and Costain 2001). MGDI is seen as an extension to the CGDI to respond to the "need for a comprehensive, integrated and common infrastructure of marine data and information … accessible to all stakeholders."

At regional level, the INSPIRE project (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe) recognizes "hydrographic data" as one of its "selected topographic themes" for data content for a regional SDI for Europe (INSPIRE 2002). Hydrography is defined as "surface water features such as lakes and ponds, streams and rivers, canals, oceans and shorelines." The CZM community should be aware that their input, based on knowledge and experience of the coastal zone, is imperative during specification of SDI initiatives, whether at national, regional or global level. During the 5-year period that the European SDI progressed from the GI2000 initiative (1995-1999) through ETeMII (European Territorial Management Information Infrastructure - 1999-2001) to INSPIRE (2001 to present), reference to specific themes for spatial data content in the proposed SDI specification was initially resisted. After much debate, the hydrographic component (including coastal zones) was included, along with only two other "topographic themes" - transport and height.
At global level, two main SDI initiatives have been the Global Mapping Project and the GSDI conferences (1996 to present). Both of these initiatives build on national and/or regional SDI work and neither makes any special provision for coastal zone data. What amounts to a global SDI does exist for oceanographic and meteorological data due to well and long established information management and data exchange programmes of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC), the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and other international research initiatives (Longhorn 2003).

This paper examines three issues. Why should CSDI be considered of such importance that its explicit specification within NSDI and RSDI warrants extra effort? What are the main requirements for CSDI components? How have various nations approached CSDI implementation?