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International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Vol XXXV, Part B4. Istanbul 2004 
  
People and organisations have collected information for 
thousands of years. All through that time some of this 
information has been georeferenced - in some way. From the 
early census information in the Middle East, historical battles 
and event and records such as the Domesday Book can often be 
referenced to a location and often very accurately. 
Today there is a greater perception of the need to georeference 
information arising from the growing recognition, largely at 
government level, of the real value of geographic information in 
delivering solutions and establishing more effective ways of 
analysing information. Such information will be collected to 
satisfy an application such as property values for taxation, river 
quality samples, crop health, highway traffic statistics etc. As 
such this information may or may not be suited to serve in other 
applications. However when conflated with other datasets the 
quality and usefulness of the data will generally improve. albeit 
at a cost of resolving many discrepancies that will inevitably be 
found. 
3.4 Are we moving towards coherence or chaos? 
As technology improves one would expect maturity and the 
integration across datasets to emerge, but there are several 
recognised barriers. 
Business Priorities 
Organisations, as we have seen, collect information to meet a 
business need whether they are in government or the private 
sector. Resources are often scarce and therefore business 
priorities are the major objectives to be met. As a consequence 
the cost of extending a datasets capability for perhaps the sole 
benefit of the third party is rarely an attractive proposition. 
Boundaries of the enterprise 
While there may be a coming of minds at international levels 
over key issues such as global warming, this then transforms 
when we return home to manage national priorities. This “silo 
mentality" often surfaces and will strengthen down to the 
state/region/department levels of government. Further this 
continues to local government/municipality level where the 
remit of elected officers is their local area and in many respects 
quite rightly so. Hence each of these “levels” of administration 
tends to establish barriers to information sharing and exchange. 
Differences in specification and practice are evident across 
different parts of government in almost every country. In 
several European countries data maintenance can be distributed 
across the same level of government e.g. detailed information is 
mapped by municipalities in Denmark and Italy. However very 
significant differences in the nature and the content of the data 
will often be found from one municipality to another. In larger 
countries e.g. Germany the federal states and the mapping 
agency have achieved a common standard (ATKIS) for some 
datasets. 
New Technology for all 
New technology is a boon to the commercial and public sectors 
alike. The cost of entry into operational data collection is now 
much lower than 10 years ago. New technologies such as GPS, 
digital imagery and mobile PCs make it easier to get in a car 
and go out and collect data such as street centrelines and 
attributes. LIDAR and airborne radar require more investment 
but are increasingly being operated and are providing new and 
289 
different sources of data. The growth in the availability of new 
datasets is significant and in many countries now offers 
alternatives to the traditional reference data. 
Little standardisation 
The ISO 191xx family of GI standards [www.isotc21 l.org] are 
now emerging, and are starting to provide a common model. 
However the ability of the majority of these standards to 
influence real data standardisation is limited to the provision of 
a simple profile at this stage, but this is a start. Elsewhere, such 
as the UK the British Standards for geographic information 
provide a tighter model for some datasets e.g. street 
information. However these standards fall short in terms of 
providing a generic model to support several application areas 
and have so far encouraged divergence rather than reuse of 
definitive information. 
Generally there are few models to support a coherent structure 
and form of georeferencing and data collection. It's not 
uncommon for organisations to adopt new digital methods as a 
direct replication of the tried and tested paper methods 
processes — it's perceived as the line of least risk. Hence data 
such as environmentally sensitive sites may be collected at 
small scales of say 1:25,000 while the cadastre may be 
maintained at 1:2,000. When a third party attempts to develop 
an automated process to determine whether any properties fall 
within the environmental area, the reliability of the results 
would be limited and liability on the provider potentially 
significant. 
Summary 
The combination of new technology, the limits and priorities of 
the business enterprise and the lack of effective standards 
provides barriers to seamless information exchange and hence 
automated GI based services. 
4. THE DIGITAL NATIONAL FRAMEWORK 
4.1 Joined-up geography 
The need to provide a vision for better integration of geographic 
information has been emerging for several years in many 
countries. Great Britain has enjoyed a robust mapping 
infrastructure for over 200 years and this has been reinforced at 
regular intervals, for example in 1938 through a fundamental 
review [Ordnance Survey, 1938] that established the core 
foundations for today's GI infrastructure in Great Britain. While 
the growth in the use of GI in Great Britain has been 
significant, for all the reasons explained earlier, it remains 
difficult to easily link or share applications and some reference 
information and thereby automate analysis processes. The 
concept of the Digital National Framework [DNF] was born in 
1999 following a period of consultation in GI and the 
publication of several reports on the benefits of GI [e.g. 
OXERA, 1999]. 
OS MasterMap 
From the DNF concept OS MasterMap quickly evolved. OS 
MasterMap is as a layered database of reference information of 
which the first deliverable, in November 2001, was the detailed 
and definitive topographic framework for England, Wales and 
Scotland. There are over 430,000,000 features in the