Director,
Interoperability Programmes
Open Geospatial
Consortium Inc.
rsingh@opengeospatial.org
A
new view of geoprocessing
As governments across the
world struggle to meet the
urgent needs of water and
sanitation, geospatial technology
is co-evolving with World
Wide Web creating more avenues
for efficient management of
these basic amenities
Governments
at all levels in all countries
must manage water supply and
sanitation for their citizens.
A number of factors conspire
to make this work increasingly
difficult:
•
Population
growth and urbanisation put
increasing demands on existing
water and sanitation infrastructure
and on watersheds and aquifers.
Most growth is near oceans,
where groundwater is often
brackish and river water has
been polluted by upstream
activity.
•
Economic
development accelerates water
use, water pollution and watershed
destruction. Aquifers are
being emptied. These factors
cause current or impending
freshwater shortages for agriculture,
fisheries, hydropower, recreation,
industry and individuals'
needs.
•
Global
warming causes flooding and
drought; less seasonal regularity
in river flows; disruptions
of aquatic ecosystems; more
severe storms that cause sewage
and chemical overflows; and
retreat of coastal aquifers
due to coastal flooding and
rising sea level.
•
Water
ignores jurisdictional boundaries
as it flows over the earth,
underground and through the
atmosphere. This demands a
level of inter-jurisdictional
cooperation that challenges
governments and stakeholder
groups.
Government agencies, businesses, universities
and non-governmental organisations
can draw on the technologies and traditions
of GIS, remote sensing and other geospatial
technologies to help address these
problems. However, the traditional
ways we use these technologies are
outmoded, preventing their fullest
use. This article looks at how geospatial
technology is co-evolving with the
World Wide Web, and we examine what
this means for government managers
and others who seek to get maximum
benefit from their information systems
as they struggle to meet urgent needs
for water and sanitation.
Our problematic old view of
geospatial technologies
Our work is constrained by our old
ways of thinking. We think of geospatial
software in packages and we think
of data in files. We think of data
collection in terms of discrete projects
yielding data for specific uses. We
think of interoperability in terms
of file formats and bulk file conversion.
We think of data models as necessarily
different for different purposes.
