Benefits and bottlenecks of SDI development in Egypt
People
At the moment, there are inadequate-trained people for data collection, processing, analysis and for establish and manage the infrastructure. People with appropriate training are difficult to keep in governmental organizations because of the attraction to work as consultants in the private sector. The use of GIS among the users in Egypt was overall less than 5 years. Also the SDI-awareness in the country is limited.
Fig 2: Percentage of future users' expectations based on the benefits from SDI in Egypt
Standards
Standard development and implementation for spatial data in Egypt is limited. The existing data can not easily be integrated (no common reference system) due to variations in projections and other data quality aspects. There are no national standards on data formats and content. Most institutions develop or adopt their own local with as result difficulty in data sharing and integration.
Access Network
In Egypt, identification of potential useful spatial data is not easy, because there is no metadata and data directory available in the Internet. Services delivery and office visits are still the most used methods to obtain spatial data. CD Rom is the most frequently used medium of data transfer. Due to absence of sharing mechanism, users do not know where the spatial data is stored and have no efficient tools to access the data. Most of GIS activities in Egypt are project oriented. The inter and intra organizational sharing of data is limited.
Policy
In Egypt until now no formal policy framework has been put in place to
facilitate the development of SDI. Most of data producing agencies do not have a mandate for data dissemination. No legislation for copyright and ownership is in place. This results in ad-hoc arrangement (users get map secretly) for data distribution, which is not beneficial for the government and private sector.
Fig 3: Distribution (%) of SDI bottlenecks in Egypt
BENEFITS OF A SDI
Organizations in Egypt where asked by means of a questionnaire to indicate potential benefits of an SDI. The results are summarized in Figure 2. The respondents (N=29) consider the "duplication of work goes down" as the major benefit of and SDI (35%). As a result of the sharing of data double work in form of data collection or multiple digitizations of data is avoided.
Sharing of the data is possible through coordinated and structured access to a wide variety of information (metadata) about spatial data. The next benefit of an SDI for Egypt is the elimination of "spatial data islands (20%)". At this moment spatial data is collected and maintained for restricted use domains.
The exchange of date across domains is limited, which with as a result "spatial data islands." SDI might have a positive effect on connecting these "islands" A key role in this respect plays the central government. They have the possibility to change the situation. At this moment there is a substantial interest from the government to formulate sound policy to organize information.
The policy would give a clear guideline on how spatial data has to be collected, managed, updated and distributed to the end users. It will help to reduce the duplication of work and the reduction of "spatial islands." Besides the two more efficiency oriented benefits of SDI mentioned above, the respondents also expect that SDI is beneficial for decision making and policy support. With SDI policy making is more supported with spatial data (15%) and the decision making process is considered to be more effective (15%).
Overall we see that the respondents consider more efficiency due to data
sharing as the major SDI benefit
for Egypt, improved decision is also important.
Fewer benefits are expected from an effective use of governmental resources and more governmental transparency. The respondents do not see any SDI benefits within a single department.