The Directorate of Geosciences of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), together with the Federal University of Paraná and the University of Sao Paulo, organised the II Brazilian Symposium on Spatial Data Infrastructure with the theme “12 years of INDE”. Yeah, the National SDI of Brazil was born in 2008! Obviously, the symposium was held online due to the pandemic.

The Symposium brought together spatial data producers and users who work directly with Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI). Before the closing session, a round table took place to present and disseminate the objectives and activities of the IDEais network, under the driving tittle “New possibilities and challenges of SDI”.

The round table was chaired by Homero Filho and Miguel Bernabé and had 4 panellists: Diego Seco Naveiras (Universidad de Concepción VIII Region, Chile), Daniela Moctezuma Ochoa (Centro de Investigación en Ciencias de Información Geoespacial Aguascalientes, México), Carlos Granell (Universitat Jaume I de Castellón, España), and Carlos López-Vázquez (Universidad ORT Uruguay – Laboratorio LatinGEO IGM+ORT Montevideo, Uruguay).

The four panellists gave presentations relating varied technical, societal and legal aspects of SDI with the latest developments of the IDEAIS network. Diego presented the overall objectives, organisation and activities of the IDEAIS network. Daniela focused on IA research lines of the network, particularly on natural language processing to bring voice-based access to SDI resources. Carlos López’s talk touched the lack of regulations for ephemeral data (social data, VGI) in comparison to traditional, government-led spatial data hosted in SDI nodes.

My talk (in Spanish) “Las IDE son clave en la Transformación Digital (de los gobiernos)” (SDI are key to the Digital Transformation (of Goverments)) focused on the Digital Transformation policy as the main challenge facing society today, especially since the pandemic broke out. My take-away message was that SDI can and should play an important role in how we achieve the digital transformation of governments. A decade or more ago, SDI was a competitive infrastructure as there were a few or no competitors bringing the richness and diversity of spatial and temporal data sets that SDI provided. Today’s situation is quite different. It is worse for SDI. The increased number and quality of competitor is amazing. Especially relevant is the ability of these new competitors to provide ephemeral, highly customised services to access and consume spatial data that matter to lay citizen, not only experts and scientists.

SDI can still take an intermediate step between the two previous options. SDI could expand its group of users to governments and administrations, to definitely become a key actor in the Digital Transformation for providing better and more efficient public services through spatial data. By gradually transforming it from infrastructures to digital platforms, SDI can indirectly serve the whole of society, while maintaining the core of specialized users. SDIs must join the wave of digital transformation to survive!

Find my presentation in HTML format  and other information sources I used while preparing it.