2010-05-17
The objective of the United Nations Geographic Working Group (UNGIWG) is to build a United Nations Spatial Data Infrastructure (UNSDI) with the purpose of enhancing geospatial data and information sharing and exchange between UN agencies and programmes as well as national and regional SDI's and promote and achieve sustainable development and food security.
"Spatial Data Infrastructure" (SDI) is the base collection of technologies, data, human resources, policies, institutional arrangements, and partnerships that enable the availability, exchange of and access to geographically-related information using common practices, protocols, and specifications.
SDI is a framework to enable users with different mandates and disciplines to operate in a cooperative and cohesive manner to acquire, access, retrieve, analyze and disseminate geospatial data and information in an easy and secure way. It particularly helps to improve the efficiency of development, management, use and maintenance of geospatial databases.
UNSDI is expected to support:
- Data access and sharing through a decentralized coordination framework
- Interoperability and standardization of tools
- Place-based management
- Portability
- Build once, use many times
- Continuity and sustainability
