A national policy on the use of spatial data

By Prof. N. T. S. Wijesekera

[email protected]
 

The Ministry of National Building and Estate Infrastructure Development, and the Ministry of Land and Land Development has proposed to seek approval of the Government for the implementation of a National Policy on Spatial Data Use.

Prior to seeking the approval, the two ministries have sought views of the public on the draft policy through an advertisement that appeared in the newspaper Daily News on 9th June 2008.

The present discussion attempts to explain the issues pertaining to spatial data, looks at the requirements that need to be addressed in a National policy on spatial data and presents some views on the presently available draft document.

Our policy document differs from other similar documents around the globe due to several reasons. The key difference is that the other nations have developed or are in the process of developing policies for spatial data as a fundamental component, whereas our national policy stresses on the use of spatial data.

This needs to be carefully looked at because it is important that the government addresses this issue in the most appropriate and rational manner.

Spatial Data

Information that identifies the geographic location and associated characteristics of natural or constructed features and boundaries on the earth is usually known as either spatial data, spatially referenced data, geographic data, geospatial data or geographically referenced data.

With the advancement of information technology, increased population, scarcity of resources, rising fuel prices, challenging climate change scenario, devastation created by natural disasters etc., there is tremendous pressure on the decision makers and managers to carryout rational resource management ensuring transparency.

In a country, since the resources that need to be managed are mostly spatially scattered on the earth’s surface, any rational management attempt would naturally demand the knowledge of such resources in relation to their spatial existence.

This means that the geospatial information needs to be expanded in to ‘knowledge ware’, where a geographic map needs to interact with a database of resource information.

It also means that maps and geographic information, something with which surveyors, engineers and sometimes geographers are only too familiar, needs to be made available to the non-geographically empowered user group to make rational decisions.

Geographic or spatial information could be used to help in the overall planning and management of assets for the government, public can be supported with service and other location information, and the business community could use such information for the provision of services in a competitive environment.

A spatial data infrastructure properly established would enhance national security, enable the identification of reported incidents from the public, identify suitable deployment etc.

In essence, a system that facilitates the provision of reliable spatial data would no doubt enhance the services being supplied to the public and therefore would ultimately lead to operational savings leading to a reduced financial burden to the general public.

Need of a Policy

In the case of using spatial data for decision making, one has to carryout the acquisition, storage, and analysis of parameters pertaining to spatially distributed resources. Though spatial data are usually tagged with a specific set of coordinates, it is common for some data to be aggregated and tagged to spatial entities that have a known identity.

This enables management decisions to be made with respect to specific features such as terrain, administrative units, road network, weather zoning, etc. In order to put spatial data into shared use, it is necessary that the data referenced by one group is compatible with the other.

When that data are not shared it is quite common for one group to independently prepare the same data set that another group had already done.

Therefore a nation that attempts to minimise data duplication, at least it is necessary to provide guidelines for data preparation and also provide guidelines for data sharing. Presently in our country there are a few administrative boundary datasets prepared by several author agencies or projects through labour intensive digitising programs.

There are many reasons for this and the key issues at present are the lack of availability and the extremely high price tag on spatial data.

As a result users for their own objectives go for data preparation using project specific funds and time.

The unfortunate situation is that the nation cannot share such data with confidence since such data had been prepared for a specific objective and with their accuracy standards.

One major problem faced by those who attempt to share the data is the revelation that even the administrative boundaries of different authors appear suitable for sharing.

Therefore in the best interest of the nation it is necessary for us to have a spatial data policy leading to an appropriate spatial data structure. There for any attempt to have a national spatial data policy is commendable.

Decision Making

If a spatial data infrastructure is to serve a nation in the most beneficial manner, then it needs to consist of rules or a set of regulations that arise out of a well thought out policy.

If not, there will be scattered spatial data activities that would take place within individual frameworks which may or may not serve a collective purpose. Any work within the country is done for the nation, and they carryout such work consuming resources that are of the nation.

Therefore it is nothing but prudent for the decision makers to take efforts to ensure that all information generated through such activities fall in line with the overall objectives of the nation.

Such efforts would ascertain the most economical use of resources. At least it would satisfy the uniformity of data collection, which would lead to avoiding the duplication of efforts.

It is common knowledge and common sense that any duplication of work would lead to a non optimal use of resources. As such one needs to question as to how such a common item had gone unnoticed by our learned decision makers and associated facilitators.

If the nation had not thus far taken reasonable decisions to streamline the situation, then the general public should question as to whether it is the lack of knowledge of the decision makers, administrators and managers, or whether it is the lack of their interest or whether it is the need to safeguard the self interests, or whether it is the reluctance to take painful decisions effecting a set of organisations though it is obvious that the benefit from a prudent action is certainly for the nation.

It is easy to put forth excuses for not executing a task but what is important is that the managers carryout some soul searching to understand the efforts taken up to date and also to check whether they could be stated as the best under those circumstances.

Having identified the need, then what is more important is to initiate fast track action to make the national spatial data infrastructure a reality. Therefore the attempts indicated through the newspaper advertisement mentioned earlier is timely and should be strengthened in order to make sure that we have a national policy which is strong enough to ensure the fulfilment of our national development targets.

Learn from Others

When one looks around to assess the experiences of the world, many nations have already established national geospatial databases.

The United States of America initiated action on national spatial data in the year of 1953, and in the year 1994 president Clinton through an Executive Order defined the national spatial data infrastructure as the technology, policies, standards, and human resources necessary to acquire, process, store, distribute and improve utilisation of geospatial data.

According to a news item in year 2005, the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister UK had announced the plans for a new national geospatial database.

There are many countries in the West, Europe and Latin America and in Asia, who have developed or are in the process of developing a national geospatial data infrastructure.

In the year 2001, a survey had revealed that approximately 62.5% of the countries in the world are working on their national spatial data infrastructure in order to create an efficient environment for the access of spatial data.

Therefore one would only require to look around for the experiences and then fine tune them to suit our needs to establish a strong National Policy. If we perform the task scientifically then there is no doubt that we could establish a sound policy and move forward without spending many years like some other countries who thought about it at first.

However, on the other hand if we attempt to re-invent the wheel then it may take a longer period than the rest, because we will be starting from scratch, but also need to survive resource limitations we come across as a developing nation. National policies do not fall from the sky.

They have to be developed through hard work by learned, experienced personnel, with adequate stakeholder participation, and ensuring transparency. Therefore when a public consultation is targeted it is nothing but fair to present the background work that had gone into the policy statements.

It is always done through the so called White Papers which include the preparers, methodology adopted, details of analysis and list of references. Such a white paper linked to a policy document would receive public confidence while fulfilling the transparency of the activity.

It is felt that the absence of information with respect to such background works pertaining to our draft geospatial policy, would restrict the public from making a fair assessment of the efforts by the policy makers.

Therefore the prepared the document for public comments need to present a scientific background document or a white paper for the National Spatial Data Policy. This would enable the draft policy to win the public confidence.

A National Policy on the Use of Spatial Data should address the needs of a nation and therefore a policy document should possess a section for the purpose. The purpose of a spatial data policy would be to establish principles, responsibilities and requirements for collecting and managing geospatial data and metadata pertaining to the country.

This has to be clearly stated, and stated at the beginning of the policy statement. Otherwise the policy would lead to ambiguous statements and as a result would not solve the problems faced by the nation. With the expression of the purpose the policy makers need to next address the scope and the applicability of the document they prepare.

The scope should cover the (1) types of data, (2) data operations in the context of data life cycle phases, and (3) agencies that would be covered by the policy. The policy scope need to include a section on the expected geospatial audience so that the vision of the policy could be better expressed to the general public when calling for comments. In my opinion, our national spatial data policy should include these two major components explicitly and at the beginning.

Policy Statements

The policy for national spatial data needs to establish specific requirements that will be adhered in the planning, collecting, acquiring, processing, documenting, storing, accessing, maintaining, and retiring of geospatial data.

The policy has to lead the way to technical data standards, content standards of geospatial metadata, and implementation procedures and guidelines.

The policy should require the establishment of spatial data partnerships across various types of agencies and the government which avoids wasteful duplication of efforts and ensures effective and economic management of geospatial resources.

Our proposed national policy on the use of spatial data use has included seven policy statements and it may be appropriate to look at the statements in line with the above basic concepts to ascertain a reasonable policy document.

There are a few more major changes that need to be made to the draft policy other than for the purpose, scope, applicability and expected audience as indicated above. The policy in my opinion should give utmost importance to identify spatial data cycle and address policies according to this governing process.

It would enable a systematic approach to identify a complete coverage of issues that have to be addressed. The present draft has attempted to address several burning issues and it is a very important aspect.

However, what is important is to have a foresight and then ensure complete policy coverage for the entire spatial data activity cycle. The next major issue in the present policy comes from the non specific, non committal statements that enables no effect of the policy on the present problem that is burning and awaiting to be addressed without any further delay.

For example, the statement 1.1 under data standards says only, “Compilation and publication of the base map data standards through the web based information system.” It appears that the policy assumes a web based information system which to my knowledge is non existent.

The statement does not indicate the person or agency that is responsible for the actions specified in the statement or whether the actions fall into the category of ‘should be done’ or ‘may be done’.

It may the best interest of the nation to ensure that the statements in the draft policy are ‘to the point’ and leads to ‘clear’ action. This improvement is not a very difficult one. One needs to look at the policy documents of the other countries and available literature on the web to obtain guidelines to suit Sri Lankan situation.

It may be worth mentioning that the copyright section has ignored the fact that national projects have already consumed public money through state coffers and any copyright approval needs to ensure public access rights to such information. It is true that there are intellectual property rights, but it should not be allowed for the public rights to be shadowed by such laws.

Hence the policy needs to look at how the other countries have tackled the issue of copyrights. There are many nations who have battled between these and arrived at rational systems. Therefore one needs to assess the timeline of the spatial data policy development cycle that our country is in, prior to making a visionary document.

The draft document quite rightly and appropriately addresses the issue of data security. This is one area which needs to be improved in the present practice of spatial data infrastructure.

Therefore this effort is commendable. It is important that the policy opens up facilities for sharing by a large number of participants working towards a common goal.

However it is of great importance that the policy ensures that spatial data of the nation is used by the institutions that share the national ideology. At the same time the policy should be innovative to provide adequate access, provided opportunity for sharing of experiences and carryout consultations on matters of common interest.

The draft policy statement has given a heavy weight on the promotion of use of spatial data by inserting two statements; one for use in development planning and one for education.

Before commenting on these two sections, one has to first identify that to emphasize on the ‘use of spatial data’ needs to follow a policy on ‘spatial data’. Once the nation has a sound policy on spatial data cycle, then the use will always fall into place. On the other hand, a rational person or a decision maker needs to sit back and think carefully.

Present problem is that though we know the need to use the spatial data for rational resource management, we are unable to progress as a result of spatial data policy issues. Therefore it is not prudent for us to re-invent the wheel; instead we need to identify the state of the art and then establish a sound policy for spatial data.

One could then look at the spatial data use, and if found inadequate could be addressed probably through agencies that are responsible for education, plan implementation etc.

Considering the prevailing situation of the country with respect to spatial data use, a national spatial data policy should not be delayed any more. However it needs to be developed in a structured manner ensuring the completeness by using appropriate resources.

There is a burning issue that has to be solved by prudently developing a spatial data policy leading to economic growth, environmental sustainability, social progress and national security.

(The writer is Chairman of International Centre for Geoinformatics Applications and Training, University of Moratuwa)