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Spatial Data Infrastructures

  • By: Roland M. Wagner
  • In: Encyclopedia of Geography
  • Edited by: Barney Warf
  • Subject:General Geography, Earth & Environmental Science

A spatial data infrastructure (SDI) is an infrastructure for integration, transportation, and distribution of spatial data via Web services using service-oriented architectures (SOA) and business process patterns. Therefore, it supplies applications with spatial products. A product might be a data set, a service, or a combination of the two.

This entry describes the characteristics of the payload spatial data, gives a historical context, introduces roles and fundamental processes, and illustrates them with technical example architecture, including data, query, and service models.

Characteristics of Spatial Data

Spatial data can be used for many different purposes due to their special characteristics. Like other types of data, spatial data can be encoded digitally and transported via the Internet. But also, in many cases, they can be displayed graphically, making the information ...

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