[GSDI Legal Econ] companies positioning themselves for the "SDI market"?

[Kate Lance]

(for those who didn't see the following in the October SDI-Africa newsletter.... http://www.gsdi.org/newsletters.asp)
   
  In a recent press release (http://www.galdosinc.com/archives/267) in which Galdos Systems announced that it had been awarded a contract to develop an urban spatial data infrastructure (SDI) within the city of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, the company described itself as "a leader in the rapidly growing Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) market." I found this interesting.  Most companies speak of a geospatial market.  I don't recall having seen before a company saying that it specializes in the 'SDI market'.  After seeing this, I did a quick search online on "SDI market" and found another press release (from CubeWerx, http://www.cubewerx.com/main/about_us/news/India.html), which highlights that the company is positioned to "capture business into the growing Spatial Data Infrastructure market in India” 
   
  I didn’t find others, meaning it's not as though there's a major scramble to cater to an ‘SDI market’, but these two cases did strike me as a sort of novelty.
     
    Do you think contracts specifically for SDI are on the rise (projects looking at geospatial service provision across agencies, as opposed to use within a single agency)? And if so, do those offering tenders have the impression that an SDI can be built?... that it's just a matter of installing computers, setting up a network, compiling databases?   To me (and presumably to most/all of us who are focusing on legal, economic, policy, social aspects of SDI), so much of SDI rests on cultivating institutional change over time.  So, it would be interesting to see how/whether institutional elements are being incorporated into contracts and how the effectiveness of institutional arrangements are evaluated in terms of project deliverables (since this does seem problematic). 

   
     


   

 		
---------------------------------
How low will we go? Check out Yahoo! Messenger’s low  PC-to-Phone call rates.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.gsdi.org/pipermail/legal-econ/attachments/20061010/fd55942d/attachment.html