Political Aspects of Spatial Data Infrastructures

The geographic information is the information that describes phenomena associated directly or indirectly with a location with respect to the Earth surface. Nowadays, there are available large amounts of geographic data that have been gathered with different purposes by different institutions and companies. Furthermore, the volume of this information grows day by day thanks to important technology advances in high-resolution satellite remote sensors, GPS, databases and geoprocessing software notwithstanding an increasing interest by individuals and institutions. Even more, it is possible to georeference complex collections of a broad range of resource types, including textual documents, real-time acquired observations, legacy databases of tabular historical records, multimedia components such as audio and video, and scientific algorithms.