Monday, October 01, 2007

Will “SDI 1.0” Revolutionize GEOINT?


In April 2003, Apple opened its iTunes Music Store online, marking a revolutionary policy and business model shift for distributing and consuming digital music. The result of this shift can be seen on streets, subways and in shopping malls around the world, as people have embraced this new source of digital entertainment. By July 2007, the store had sold 3 billion songs, accounting for over 80 percent of all online digital music sales.

The iTunes phenomenon is a good example of how a new form of digital content dissemination was quickly embraced by users. Can the same type of revolutionary shift happen for digital geospatial information?

In the 1990’s, forward-thinking government policies towards high-resolution satellite imagery combined with the emergence of the Internet fueled a 21st century explosion of access to online imagery. Geospatial content is now easily accessed and used in platforms such as Microsoft Virtual Earth and Google Earth.

These days another revolution is right around the corner, powered by new policies that endorse a proven suite of standards for distributing and consuming digital geospatial information called Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) 1.0.

Based on specifications produced by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), SDI 1.0 is set to address the pressing issue of geospatial interoperability and usability of modern location-based content.

In fact, I think the SDI 1.0 revolution is already underway and deploying cost-effective solutions that challenge traditional Geospatial Intelligence (GEOINT) business models. You probably won’t see these solutions at your local shopping mall, but they are critical to mission success and national security.

I'll try and make the case in my next few blog posts...

2 Comments:

At 10/05/2007 06:03:00 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Is SDI 1.0 an accepted standard? or just a grouping of stndards?

 
At 10/05/2007 08:56:00 AM, Blogger Jeff Harrison said...

SDI 1.0 is not really a standard itself - it's a collection of standards that gets "endorsed" by various organizations.

 

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