Applied development of spatial data and information infrastructure

The developments of information technologies during last 50 years have exposed several tools that could facilitate the management of nations and cities, improvement of the life quality, protection of the nature. GIS has taken place as an important tool which was used to make critical decisions by governments. However, conventional GIS approaches have become insufficient to meet the requirements of spatial data and information in the rapidly developing and changing world. Respect to the developments of the technology and changes of the expectations, advanced approaches that contains modern GIS tools are brought out which can provide effective management and manipulation of standard spatial data and able to access and share it. A Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) is a special case of GIS, specifically geared towards geographic information. SDI subsumes technology, systems, standards, networks, people, policies, organizational aspects, geo-referenced data, and delivery mechanisms to end users. In this study, SDI is researched from technical aspects. It is aimed to generate a SDI model by examining the tools and international standards, which can meet the requirements of national and global SDI. Also conformity between SDI tools themselves, international standards and technical specifications are examined in this research. Keywords: Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI), Metadata, Catalogue Service, Clearinghouse, Database, Geographic Information System (GIS), Standard, Web Service