Spatially Enabled Government and Society
Societies can be regarded as spatially enabled where location and spatial information are regarded as common goods made available to citizens and businesses to encourage creativity and product development’ (Williamson et al., 2006) cit. by (Rajabifard, et al., 2010).
More recently, a reference to UNRCC-PCGIAP Kuala Lumpur Declaration on Spatially Enabled Government and Society (FIG, 2012), cited by (Teo, 2013), points towards a similar direction:
- Spatially enabled Government and Society, recognizing that all activities and events have a geographical and temporal context, make decisions and organize their affairs through the effective and efficient use of spatial data, information and services; and
- Spatial enablement, that is the ability to add location to almost all existing information, unlocks the wealth of existing knowledge about social, economic and environmental matters, and can play a vital role in understanding and addressing the many challenges that we face in an increasingly complex and interconnected world.
Additionally, and according to (Wallace, et al., 2010), spatially enabled societies demand accurate and timely information about land: land information provides the link between people and activities, within an ecosystem illustrated in Figure 1.1.
Figure 1.1 - Locate, connect and deliver spatial information (Rajabifard, 2009)
But, to achieve the benefits of spatial enablement, people who design and build systems need to set up the right foundations. Future directions associated with realizing spatially enabled societies will need to include a focus on creating awareness of the importance of maintaining existing spatial and land infrastructures. The modern challenge is to redesign the existing tools used to perform fundamental business processes in order to achieve much more relevant results across society (Williamson, et al., 2011).
Moreover, spatially enabling Governments and societies for sustainable land administration and management will require structural changes in the institutional, legislative and professional domains as well as embracing Open Standards, interoperability (systems, institutional and legislative), culture of collaboration and sharing, avoiding duplication such as mapping once, use many times, encourage the incorporation of volunteered information and developing platforms by locating, connecting and delivering information from difference scales, purposes and origins (Teo, 2012a), as illustrated in Figure 1.2.
Figure 1.2 - From Data to Informed Decisions and Sustainable Actions (Teo, 2013)
In fact, according to (Steudler & Rajabifard, 2012) spatial is everywhere and our ability to leverage and harness the ubiquity of spatial information will correlate to benefits in terms of wealth creation, social stability and environmental management. Spatial information intrinsically reflects the relationship between people and land by connecting activities to location. Additionally, see also Wallace vision of place as an important factor to improve information manageability illustrated in Figure 1.3.
Location is increasingly regarded as the fourth driver in decision-making, in addition to social, economic and environmental drivers. Consequently, land-related information has a key role in spatial enablement where good land governance can facilitate the delivery of a spatially enabled government to respond to the global agenda and achieve sustainable development. Societies and their governments need to become spatially enabled in order to have the right tools and information at hand to take the right decisions (Steudler & Rajabifard, 2012).
Figure 1.3 - Place as an important factor to improve information manageability (Wallace 2007) cit. by (Rajabifard, et al., 2010)
PS: This text is extracted from my Master's Thesis in GIS and Science (published at RUN: The implementation of an Enterprise Geographical Information System to support Cadastre and Exp... ) Dissertation's State of Art chapter Annex 1 - Spatially Enabled Government and Society.
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