1 2004 
  
ON DEVELOPING SPATIAL DATA INFRASTRUCTURE OF CHINA 
Deren Li, Huayi Wu 
LIESMARS, Wuhan University 
Luoyu Road 129, Wuhan, P.R. China, 430079 
Email: dli@wtusm.edu.cn, wuhuayi@mail.liesmars.wtusm.edu.cn 
Commission IV, WG IV/4 
KEY WORDS: Digital Earth, SDI, GIS, GeoStar 
ABSTRACT: 
From Information Highway, Spatial Information Infrastructure (SDI) to Digital Earth, the requirement from the user raised new 
chances and challenges to GIS software. As a part of Digital Earth, the core of Digital China is SDI of the country and that of all 
levels of administrative regions. This paper discusses the requirement of GIS software system for the construction of SDIs of China 
in detail. As an initial solution for creating various levels of SDIs in China, GeoStar, a GIS software system capable of providing a 
powerful platform for integrating multi-source massive spatial data in distributed computing environment is introduced. Based on 
our successful experiences of GeoStar applied in a series of pilot projects of SDIs in China, it is concluded that GeoStar is a feasible 
solution of software environment for creating the country level and regional levels of SDIs in China. 
1. INTRODUCTION 
Despite the nature of globalization of the information revolution, 
most policies for information and telecommunications 
infrastructure are developed and working at the national level. 
These national policies reflect regional economic, social, 
historical, and political circumstances. Based on a dozen case 
studies analyzing how national-level policy initiatives address 
the challenge of information technology, interactive content, 
and new applications, the former US President, Bill Clinton, 
proposed the concept of "Information Highway" and issued the 
National Information Infrastructure (NIT) Initiative in 1993. 
This Initiative clearly concluded that an advanced 
communications and information infrastructure should be a 
national priority of the US. This is the first proposed national 
information infrastructure in the world. 
However, the economic, social and environmental development 
of the world is based on the use of land, water and other natural 
resources. Major activities of human being such as mining, 
farming, forestry, transport, tourism, coastal zone management 
and community services are directly operating on earth surface. 
It is well accepted that more than 80 percent of the information 
we concerned is spatial and geographical related. So, the 
National Spatial Data Infrastructure (National SDI, NSDI) is the 
core and foundation of NII. Consequently, in 1994 the 
Executive Order 12906 was issued for creating the US NSDI in 
order to further accelerate spatial data sharing and 
standardization. The concept of NSDI was in later years further 
extended to Global SDI (GSDI) and regional SDI. All these 
SDIs will provide a unified way to access geographic 
information at various levels by developing an online directory 
and distributed clearinghouse with consistent standards and 
policies for data sharing. 
A conceptual breakthrough related to GSDI is Digital Earth (DE) 
proposed by the former US Vice President Al Gore in 1998. Al 
Gore described the DE as virtual representation of our planet 
that enables a person to explore and interact with the vast 
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amounts of natural and cultural information gathered about the 
Earth. It’s obvious that GSDI is the mathematical base and 
spatial information framework of DE. As the first step of 
creating the DE, a lot of countries have started to develop NSDI 
and/or regional SDIs in recent years. China has also worked on 
all aspects to create a country level SDI and different levels of 
regional SDIs. Based on these National SDI and SDIs, all 
related information including natural, cultural, social, 
economical and historical information is integrated, fused and 
utilized through this platform to form digital city, digital 
province and Digital China. 
This paper introduces our research on creating national and 
regional SDIs of China using distributed GIS platform GeoStar, 
a COM-based enterprise GIS software developed by Wuhan 
University. Section 2 discusses the technical requirements of 
GIS software as platform of SDI. Section 3 introduces the 
distributed GIS GeoStar that we applied to create SDIs in China. 
Section 4 introduces our experimental studies on creating 
Digital Shenzhen, SDI of Guangdong Province and the national 
SDI of China on GeoStar platform. Some conclusion remarks 
are given in section 5. 
2. TECHNOLOGICAL REQUIREMENTS FOR SDI 
2.1 The ability of integrating multi-source massive data 
into a seamless database 
With the development of earth observation and data collection 
technologies, geo-spatial data has been in intensive explosion. 
Terabytes of data are generated from different programs 
everyday. A national SDI is required to carry massive multi- 
source data in a distributed computing environment. And, SDI 
is also required to take in the growing dataset and have the 
ability to updating data.