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

[Roger Longhorn]

To me this simply demonstrates the 'dumbing down' of the term SDI - i.e. 
lets focus on the technology, which we can do - and forget about the 
policy issues which most who work with SDI implementation(s) agree are 
the real barriers to achieving faster development of functioning SDIs 
globally. Personally, I've nothing against this marketing approach, if 
it helps raise greater awareness of "SDI" among stakeholders. However, I 
don't really see an identifiable 'SDI market' developing any more than a 
single "information market" has developed over the past decade or more. 
As to institutional arrangements, I can't see either Galdos or Cubewerx 
getting involved in these issues as opposed to simply making available 
tools and/or consultancy that aids in data harmonisation processes.

Roger
ral at alum.mit.edu

Kate Lance wrote:

> (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).