Paper - iPRES 2011 - Singapore

With growing concerns about environmental problems, and an exponential increase in computing capabilities over the last decade, the geospatial community has been producing increasingly voluminous and diverse geographical datasets. Long-term preservation of these geographical data exposed through uniform and interoperable Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) is not typically addressed, but highly important for meeting legislative requirements, the short and long term exploitation of archived data as well as efficiency savings in managing superseded datasets. In this paper, we attempt to set out the path and describe what needs to be done now to future-proof the investment government agencies around the world have made in digital geographic data. We take the INSPIRE SDI as an exemplar to investigate the requirements for ensuring sustained access to geographical data from the perspective of a preservation-aware and INSPIRE-conformant SDI. We also outline a number of principles for the long term retention and preservation of European digital geographic information defined by the EuroSDR Geographic Data Archiving working group. In addition, we present a preservation profile of the ISO 19115 metadata standard to enable recording and exposing important preservation related information about geographical data through large-scale SDIs like INSPIRE.

iPRES, Singapore, preservation, archive, metadata, INSPIRE, ISO 19115, geographical data

application/pdf