GSDI Announces Wind-down of Association

Since its first international conference in 1996 and especially after its formal constitution in 2004, the Global Spatial Data Infrastructure Association (GSDI) has led a global campaign to advance awareness and implementation of spatial data infrastructures worldwide. Today, the association considers its mission to be largely completed and has announced the wind-down of its existence as a legal entity.

Throughout the past two decades, the association’s mission and purpose has been to enable society to leverage the power of geospatial information and associated tools to improve decision-making relating to, amongst other things, economic, social and environmental challenges that permeate local, regional and international boundaries. Today, many nations around the world have aligned with common SDI principles, practices and standards to facilitate improved collaboration and sharing of geospatial information across multiple domains and thus realised the benefits of doing so. 

Capacity building

With a focus on prioritising assistance to developing nations, the GSDI has led educational programmes and capacity building activities, funding over 100 small grants to enable communities to benefit from SDI practices. GSDI members were first in creating knowledge resources like ‘The GSDI Cookbook’ to help communities rapidly adopt SDI practices for creating, cataloguing, managing, delivering and exchanging geospatial information. 

Today those members look back with considerable satisfaction on the successes of their association and the GSDI movement. Whilst acknowledging that additional work, particularly in the developing world, is still required to expand capabilities, and that practices worldwide must be continually updated to take advantage of developments in information technology and evolving policies, they see that their original core mission and purpose has been achieved in many areas of the world. The GSDI movement has helped to produce a global network of professionals and spawned a number of new organisations and initiatives dedicated to the continued advancement of the benefits enabled through implementation of spatial data infrastructures.

UN-GGIM

With the creation of the United Nations Committee of Experts on Global Geospatial Information Management the UN now offers its member nations and GSDI professionals from across the public and private sectors the opportunity to advance the very principles and practices that the GSDI has developed and advanced over many years.

GSDI president, Dave Lovell OBE, FRGS, CGeog said: “GSDI’s members believe the time is right to recognise this moment of opportunity to offer our remaining resources to the UN-GGIM programme and other initiatives which advance activities consistent with our purpose and mission. We therefore are announcing that we will be winding down the GSDI Association as a legal entity over the coming months and using our remaining financial resources to support the United Nations Committee of Experts on Global Geospatial Information Management and specifically to fund developing nation’s attendance at this important forum. We believe and sincerely hope that the GSDI mission will continue through the thousands of professionals around the world who have contributed to and benefited from GSDI. The GSDI website will continue for as long as possible to provide a rich information resource for those implementing Spatial Data Infrastructures.”

In 2017, GIM International talked with Dave Lovell about topics ranging from knowledge sharing and capacity building to big data. Read the interview here.