Digital Libraries as a Foundation of Spatial Data Infrastructures

This chapter introduces Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) and establishes their strong conceptual and technical relationships with geographic digital libraries (geolibraries). The authors describe the origin of SDIs and highlight their role as geographic resources providers. Then, they give several examples of the use of techniques and tools taken from the digital libraries world in the development of SDIs. The purpose of this chapter is establishing a solid foundation for those aspects of SDIs that can make profit from the knowledge and tools provided by the digital library community. It will also point the key differences between SDIs and geolibraries in order to provide a broader view of these infrastructures.