SDI:The road map for Middle East development
For the purpose of unifying the Middle East georeferencing system of spatial data infrastructure, a precise Geodetic Network should be established based on a global or regional datum. This network will be considered as a basis and as a development guide for the region governments and private sector organizations. For a more convenient and precise geodetic network, it would be useful to tie the established geodetic control of the region to a number of well-distributed International Terrestrial Reference Frame (ITRF) stations. The proper connection of geodetic networks of the region to ITRF stations will lead to the adoption and use of the global reference frame as the Middle East common reference system and will be a good foundation for the SDI of the region.
Spatial Data Standards and Specifications
In the Middle East as in many regions of the globe, spatial data can be divided into two categories, the base maps and mapping for user applications. User or application data standards will depend on the requirement of the user and the objectives of the application. The base map standard is feature based, this means that each map feature may have its own defined standard that may be different from other map features. Each feature is also associated with a particular category. Each category may contain a list of features for that category and information describing their standards and attributes used to define the standard. In case of Middle East, the adoption of base map standards and specification are useful for data exchange of digital base maps and for updating of information.
Spatial Data Acquisition
The SDI can be obtained from many sources including, land surveying, digitized or scanned digital data, land records, photogrammetry and remote sensing and GPS. The continuing rapid growth of human settlements, urbanization and developments in many parts of Middle East has increased the demand of regional spatial data infrastructure, which certainly require the development of large partnerships between Middle East countries as well as private and public sectors at local, national and regional levels.
Remote Sensing imageries can be used for environmental and resource surveys, crop conditions, forest and desert cover, extent of urban area development and assessment of damages caused by natural hazards such as scarcity of ground water and droughts.
The SDI can be considered as national or local assets and many of its components are used by the governments authorities for planning and development of basic infrastructures and utility services as well as for fundamental and strategic
research for exploitation of natural
resources, environmental impact assessments in the Middle East region. The range of SDI products developed in many countries include: cadastral maps, large scale and topographic maps, national base maps and small scale maps. Most of the other mapping products would use these main basic maps as a common reference and building upon this basic information, all required thematic data and applications. The common spatial data items include geodetic control points, transportation networks, hydrological networks, contour lines etc.
Interoperability complications within the same country and between Middle East countries is expected to exist in the beginning at different levels, including: use of different datum and reference systems, cross border edge matching between data sets and over lap of some features obtained from different sources and processes. To resolve such complications a mixture of many ingredients are required, such as technology, adoption of a common concept for spatial data, standards and policies as well as political support to help in resourcing the necessary key implementations
At a regional scale, SDI programmes should be started on a national scale with wide participation and partnership of public and private organizations in the development of SDI. As well the beneficiaries will be driven from the public and private sector and non-governmental organizations.
In Middle East, SDI can assist in many applications, such as: monitoring of natural hazards, humanitarians' crises management, management and explorations of national resources, such as ground water exploration, land inventories, forest management and mineral prospecting and weather forecasting, desertification assessment. Mapping of Middle East Region should be based on land, social, climate, and topography information. Thus to get use of all available information, Spatial Data Infrastructure Initiative for Middle East region should be initiated. Participation of Middle East countries in this type of work is required and it would be recommended to be on line with the resolutions of the United Nation's Regional Cartographic activities (UNRCC Resolution (1997), to capacity building, transfers of technology and technical cooperation for the promotion of global and regional strategies for sustainable development.
Spatial Data Sharing and Integration
The concept of sharing the spatial data between users and across borders necessitates that the data sets provided by various data providers in local, national or regional levels must be integrated to develop regional SDI. This will help in the reduction of cost and effort as well as quality of the SDI. In such cases each user does not have to develop the basic
data and can avoid duplicated efforts of data development. Consequently by
sharing the cost of developing the data, data development cost will be minimized. The benefits of sharing and integrating the SDI will mainly depend on the
practical applications and businesses within each country. In all cases the user will be assured of using up to date
data sets, in addition to that the data
producers should develop the most
detailed spatial data with high quality based on their business requirements.