“Extraordinary development creates a great backlog for survey data"
What kind of support do you get from the various
governments of the region in performing your role as a
service provider and product developer in the above domains?
The majority of client of our services and products are governmental agencies. Most work we do is commissioned by governmental or government controlled agencies. This is obviously support. Missing in the Middle East more than anywhere else is the readiness of Government agencies to share data even between themselves. At lot of this is due to that interested parties are not aware of what exists. The standard comment is: There are no maps. This is generally true, because today data is no longer stored on paper maps, but are contained in database. Establishing and publishing metadata would be an important step to overcome this issue. It would allow interested users to inform themselves about the extend and descriptions of what is available, and thereby provide them the opportunity to negotiate data access with the data owners.
How do you perceive the geospatial market of Middle East with respect to other regions in terms of market maturity for spatial data products and technologies?
The Middle East Market is in someway different than other markets in that the rapid development is concentrated in relatively small cities and the base mapping is generally based
on very detailed large scale vector data. In more developed counties the rate of development is generally slower and spread out such that most mapping is at a smaller scale and less detailed. Correspondingly the GIS systems in the Middle East are different in the density and richness of features. Good data structure and management are critical to enable them to be maintained. This fact is often overlooked by many and can lead to the full value of the data not being exploited.
Most systems in place are primarily Automated Mapping and Facility Management Systems (AM/FM) and as such project or operation orientated. Operated by various utility providers as well as municipalities, these systems overlap by definition. To reap benefit from the accumulated data, advanced GIS technology is required, capable of integrating the overlapping data into a commonly accessible geodatabase. This will not only eliminate a large and costly data redundancy, but would provide valuable information - throughout any level of the governmental or public administrations - for the planning and maintenance of our increasingly complex infrastructure.
Of course, the idea is not new. Qatar started an international award winning GIS implementation more than 10 years ago, and today most of the major organizations in the region are working towards national or regional spatial infrastructure solutions. But to create something like a National Spatial Data Infrastructure is no small task. The Americans found that out the hard way. When faced with the disastrous Hurricane Katrina, the authorities were unable to respond promptly, much delay was caused by lack of coordinated access to geographic databases. They were simply not interoperable.
The problems are twofold. The biggest challenge is to establish a consensus between the system operators and stakeholders to exchange data, respectively to allow access to each others databases, even on a very restrictive level. This task is all the more difficult if public and private agencies and enterprises are involved. This problem has been discussed for years, lately in the previous issue of your publication. Considering the very slow progress in this respect, I fear it will still take many years before such concepts are introduced on a broad basis. But there is hope. For instance for Abu Dhabi, the newly formed intergovernmental GIS committee seems to make a determined effort in this direction.