Assessment and socio-economic aspects of geographic information infrastructures: Proceedings of the Workshop on Assessment and Socio-economic Aspects of Spatial Data Infrastructures

Socio-economic aspects of geographic information (infrastructures) (GII) are increasingly considered in GII development and especially in GII research. Where once the technological dimension of GII was the dimension assessed to be most relevant, it is now commonly understood that also the non-technical aspects should be addressed and understood in order to promote GII development. There may even a trend be recognised towards a nontechical focus of GII strategies. The socio-economic side of GII is also atracting the attention of the research community. It is evident that we are only at the beginning of the development of this loose network of those researching socio-economic GII issues (see De Man's paper). For one socio-economic aspect, the GII assessment aspect, a true loose network linking those with assessment expertise now not only shares experiences, but is also cooperatively working on the assessment issue. For other socio-economic issues such a network is still in development. One way of extending the socio-economic network is to disseminate the pool of ideas and research outcomes to speak of a true community of practice as De Man has put it. The proceedings of the workshop on Assessment and Socio-economic Aspects of Spatial Data Infrastructures contributes to this objective. This booklet presents the outcomes of this workshop. The workshop was initiated by the OTB Research Institute of Delft University of Technology to commemorate two years of research by one of its staff members, Garfield Giff. A selected group of academics and professionals were invited to join the workshop and to share experiences in the socio-economic frameworks within which geographic information infrastructures are emerging whether within an individual nation or across multinational regions. The contributions reflect the variety of socio-economic aspects of GII. More specifically, the presented work covers GII assessment theory, applied GII assessment, GII and eGovt, sociology and privacy.