A review of the ICA model of stakeholders in a spatial data infrastructure (SDI)

The Commission on SDI & Standards (and its predecessors) of the International Cartographic Association (ICA) has developed formal models of a spatial data infrastructure (SDI), using the viewpoints of the Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP) and the Unified Modeling Language (UML). The Commission described an SDI from the Enterprise Viewpoint (purpose, scope and policies for an SDI), Information Viewpoint (semantics of information and information processing in an SDI) and Computational Viewpoint (functional decomposition of the SDI into a set of services that interact through interfaces). The Enterprise Viewpoint model included six types of stakeholders in an SDI: Policy Maker, Producer, Provider, Broker, Value-added Reseller and End User. Subsequently, the Commission identified 39 sub-types of these stakeholders, though a better description of them might be as specializations, special cases, attributes, activities or roles.

We have identified and reviewed all the literature that has referenced the Commission’s papers on the SDI models. Most use the Commission’s papers for the definitions of an SDI and of the parts, processes and stakeholders in an SDI. In this paper, we discuss all those that have applied the ICA SDI stakeholder model, proposed improvements to the model and/or highlighted parts of the model that are not well understood. We also discuss some issues we identified when reviewing the models. Subsequently, we plan on proposing some revisions and expansions on this ICA model of the stakeholders in a spatial data infrastructure.