[GSDI Legal Econ] [SDI-Europe] eGovernment InteroperabilityCampus 2007

Roger Longhorn ral at alum.mit.edu
Thu Mar 6 07:08:10 EST 2008


Hi Sergio,

The problem of e-gov and SDI linkages has certainly not been 'sorted 
out' - and probably never will be, in any formal sense. It is also still 
of interest - but getting the e-government folk to talk to GI/SDI folk 
is not that easy.

Since the old myth is that "80% of all government data is geospatial" - 
or at least has a spatial (location) attribute/component, then most 
e-government initiatives, programmes and systems should already be 
taking account of 'spatial' - sadly, even in the most developed 
e-government systems that I have seen, this is not the case.

I was supposed to produce a brief (discussion paper) on this topic for 
the Legal & Socioeconomic Working Group in 2007, but failed to do so. I 
will give it another try in 2008!

Kind regards

Roger Longhorn
co-Chair, GSDI Legal & Socioeconomic W.G. (note the new name - approved 
by GSDI Council on 24 February)

Sergio Acosta y Lara wrote:
> Hi all. About a year ago we listmembers could heard about an 
> interesting discussion about the relationship between e-gov and SDI. A 
> pity I didn't hear anything more about it. Did the topic lose interest 
> in the community? Or was it sorted out in some way?
>
> Walter de Vries wrote:
>> Kate,
>>
>> True as that may be, maybe just two comments:
>>
>> 1) I guess my comment applies a bit more to the EU than to the US; I
>> have noticed that in the US there is occasional reference to spatial
>> data in the egov community - especially after katrina - and that
>> historically the two communnities may have come from a similar origin 
>>
>> 2) Yet, if you would check one of the major discussion fora and meeting
>> places for scientists and professionals to discuss egovernment issues in
>> the US - the Digital Government Society
>> http://www.dgsociety.org/index.php  - one can notice that geospatial
>> information already plays a marginal role, and that the term or concept
>> SDI is even hardly noticable in any of their conference proceedings.
>> Just check the call for papers for the dgo.07 conference this year :
>> http://www.dgsociety.org/call_for_papers.php . The term GIS is used
>> under the heading computer science, hence regarded as a tool, and the
>> term "information infrastructure" or spatial information infrastructure"
>> is not even mentioned. 
>>
>> On the other hand, a term which I do see appearing in these egov
>> communities is that of "bio information infrastructure" and that of
>> "legal information infrastructures". It would be interesting to see why
>> that is, and how these terms are used differently than - what we within
>> the geospatial community would consider - the spatial equivalent. It may
>> be however that the terms are used in a completely different context,
>> and have a completely different legacy of how they were formed and
>> described. 
>>
>> Walter  
>>
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> --------
>> From: Kate Lance [mailto:klance_remote at yahoo.com] 
>> Sent: Friday, March 09, 2007 11:35 AM
>> To: Walter de Vries
>> Subject: Re: [GSDI Legal Econ] [SDI-Europe] eGovernment
>> InteroperabilityCampus 2007
>>
>>
>> Walter,
>> Geospatial One-Stop (GOS) is a US Federal E-Gov initiative begun in
>> 2002, one of 24 major e-government initiatives under the White House
>> "Expanding Electronic Government" reform program. 
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Roger Longhorn [mailto:ral at alum.mit.edu] 
>> Sent: Friday, March 09, 2007 11:11 AM
>> To: Walter de Vries
>> Cc: SDI-Europe; GSDI Legal-Economic Work Grouup; EGIP
>> Subject: Re: [GSDI Legal Econ] [SDI-Europe] eGovernment
>> InteroperabilityCampus 2007
>>
>> In my SDI consulting experience, and also simply from watching how the
>> eGovernment and SDI initiatives developed in a few EU countries over the
>> past several years, the disconnect starts at the point where quite often
>> two completely different groups of people or organisations are involved
>> in developing the eGov work and the SDI (if any).
>>
>> The primary eGov folk often first see "SDI" presented to them via the
>> GI/GIS community, national mapping agencies, etc. They see this "SDI
>> thing" as a tool, not as an infrastructure - if they recognise it all. 
>> Even in the UK, where there was a GIS advisor in the eGov unit
>> developing the UK's eGovernment initiatives, standards, interoperabilty
>> framework, etc. - the early SDI components, such as the GIgateway (the
>> national GI portal) and the metadata on which it was based, were not
>> compatible with the eGov equivalents. This led many in government to
>> satisfy their eGov "information asset register" requirement but not the
>> spatial info requirements. Also, when the same datasets are classified
>> as "eGov" for one purpose and then "geospatial/SDI" for another, do we
>> really think that the people in the government departments will have the
>> time or resources to fulfill two sets of sometimes competing
>> requirements. I think not and current experience seems to prove that.
>>
>> Roger Longhorn
>> ral at alum.mit.edu
>>
>> Walter de Vries wrote:
>>
>>   
>>> Roger,
>>>
>>> I'm glad you have noticed this too. I've been going through many 
>>> articles in egov and egov-related conference proceedings and found very
>>>     
>>
>>   
>>> little reference to spatial data infrastructures, let alone any special
>>>     
>>
>>   
>>> sessions, clusters or tracks. If fact, I was aiming to report on that 
>>> during  digital governance conference in May of this year. In fact, the
>>>     
>>
>>   
>>> same applies to most egov related policies on a global scale. I am yet 
>>> to find any specific reference to the spatial part of infrastructures 
>>> in any general national egov policy. This can mean two things: either 
>>> the SDI is not really an issue in the egov community - where 
>>> increasingly most of the focus seems to be completely different issues 
>>> like edemocracy, eparticipation - or there are hardly any SDI 
>>> researchers / paper submissions on these egov conferences.
>>>
>>> Walter de Vries   
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: legal-econ-bounces at lists.gsdi.org 
>>> [mailto:legal-econ-bounces at lists.gsdi.org] On Behalf Of Roger Longhorn
>>> Sent: Friday, March 09, 2007 9:49 AM
>>> To: SDI-Europe; GSDI Legal-Economic Work Grouup; 
>>> AESI-align at i-dra.co.uk; EGIP
>>> Cc: Christopher Corbin
>>> Subject: Re: [GSDI Legal Econ] [SDI-Europe] eGovernment 
>>> InteroperabilityCampus 2007
>>>
>>> Note once again that there is no specific link/topic listed in the 
>>> "papers wanted" section that would deal with spatial information 
>>> infrastructures, even though significant volumes of eGovernment data 
>>> are also spatial. I say 'also' because for many purposes, the 
>>> spatiality is not important, but for others it certainly is. We get 
>>> back to the value of the spatial component or attribute of information 
>>> depending upon its use for specific reporting/monitoring tasks. There 
>>> continues to be a lamentable disconnect between many (most?) 
>>> eGovernment initiatives and their spatial information counterparts or
>>>     
>> components.
>>   
>>> Roger Longhorn
>>> ral at alum.mit.edu
>>>
>>> Kate Lance wrote:
>>>
>>>  
>>>
>>>     
>>>> http://www.egovinterop.net/SHWebClass.ASP?WCI=ShowDoc&DocID=2736&LangI
>>>> D=1
>>>> <http://www.egovinterop.net/SHWebClass.ASP?WCI=ShowDoc&DocID=2736&Lang
>>>> ID=1> "eGovernment Interoperability Campus 2007"
>>>> Paris, France, October 9-11, 2007
>>>> Since the late 90's, the European Union and its Member States pursue 
>>>> the strategic objective of transforming their Public Administrations 
>>>> to become more efficient and centered on the delivery of ICT-enabled 
>>>> services to citizens and businesses. The cornerstone of this strategy 
>>>> is to help developing the framework, tools and environment for 
>>>> interoperability between existing systems and applications, in order 
>>>> to foster the development of public services that would be 
>>>> cross-organisational, cross-level, cross-border, transparent, 
>>>> integrated, secure, decentralised and available anywhere at anytime.
>>>> The main aim of this third eGovINTEROP conference is to create a forum
>>>>
>>>> for discussion between the research community, technology players and 
>>>> public institutions. The conference will focus on all aspects of 
>>>> interoperability in eGovernement, both from technical as well as from 
>>>> semantic, organisational and socio-economic perspectives, and will 
>>>> discuss the progress of the various European initiatives in the field.
>>>> The Campus is expected to gather about 500 participants primarily from
>>>>
>>>> he European Union.
>>>> Conference
>>>> The conference is calling for papers to be submitted by _April 6, 
>>>> 2007_. Broad topic areas are:
>>>>
>>>> - Platforms for eGovernment interoperability
>>>> - Interoperability frameworks
>>>> - Standardisation initiatives in eGovernment
>>>> - Security of open eGovernment services
>>>> - Transport middleware for government applications
>>>> - Managing governmental business processes
>>>> - Pan-European Government services
>>>> - Local and regional eGovernment services
>>>> - Change management in networked governments
>>>>    
>>>>
>>>>       
>>>  
>>>
>>>     
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