t B4. Beijing 2008 
The International Archives oj the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences. Vol. XXXVII. Part B4. Beijing 2008 
21 
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of the systems. 
3.1 Islamic Republic of Iran E-Government action plan 
The road map and action plan for implementation of the E- 
Govemment project by different agencies was prepared by the 
Management and Planning Organization (MPO) and approved 
by the Supreme Administrative Council (SAC). In this 
document, actions to be taken were mostly put in five 
categories: 
■ Automating general processes like office automation, 
paperless environment, human resource management 
systems like personnel and financial systems, etc. 
■ Applying IT to re-engineered agency-specific procedures 
(work flow) across the nation for a total of ten procedures 
each year. The main criterion for selecting these procedures 
is the importance of the mechanization of procedures in 
providing greater majority of citizens with better services. 
■ Requiring all governmental agencies to connect their LAN 
to the Internet and to create their websites. 
* Creating a citizen portal through which governmental 
agencies' information and services might be accessed. 
■ Selecting IT courses and specifying their contents by all 
governmental organizations so that their employees can 
take these IT courses. 
3.2 Progress of E-Government in Iran 
E-Govemment may be a new phenomenon in our country, but 
with a little effort from the authorities and responsible sources 
and help from experts, this technique is going to accelerate 
more. It is significant here to mention that regardless of all 
historical and political concerns which Iran has experienced in 
the last decades, the people have showed their innovation and 
ability for improvement. That is one of the basic reasons for 
implementing of E-Govemment in this country. E-Govemment 
is going to effect on every social, technical as well as the 
political aspects. It improves the level of the education, public 
relations with the authorities and private sectors and eases the 
daily administrative job for a single Iranian. 
In the past few years, Islamic Republic of Iran Government has 
attached great importance to allocating increased budgets to 
public organisations and state companies to develop IT 
industry. The Islamic Republic of Iran in its five-year 
Development Plan seriously started to provide the government 
family with the specified annual budgets for ICT. It was in 2001 
when the first considerable budget, about US$160 million, was 
allocated to the expansion of the ITC industry. This budget has 
been increased annually and almost three-fifths of this budget 
was considered for hardware and software equipment as well as 
a commercial comprehensive information network, while the 
remaining was spent on employment generation through IT. 
Economic and social affairs office of the United Nation 
Organization issued a report entitled UN E-Govemment survey 
2008 and compares the situation of countries in terms of E- 
Govemment readiness. For this reason, an E-Govemment 
readiness index has been designed which includes three sub 
indexes namely web measure index, infrastructure index and 
human capital index. According to this survey, measures of 
mentioned sub indexes for Iran are about 0.26, 0.18 and 0.79 
respectively. It makes the total measure for Iranian E- 
Govemment readiness index equal to 0.41 and Iranian ranking 
among 192 countries is 108. Although the measure for Iran E- 
Govemment readiness has been improved during the last 3 
years (from 0.38 in 2005 to 0.41 in 2008), but the ranking of 
country has been decreased from 98 in 2007 to 108 in 2008. It 
shows our speed toward E-Govemment is less than the world 
average. 
4. SPATIAL INFORMATION AND ITS ROLE IN 
E-GOVERNMENT 
Public has right to access information in general and spatial 
information in particular. This information is crucial to 
decisions of national policy and to the general public and every 
country tries to endure this concept. Traditionally governments 
acquire information as mandated by laws and regulations and 
for day-to-day operation of public administration; as a 
custodian manages and processes information in a systematic 
manner; as a regulator prevents the abuse of information and 
ensures fair and equal access to information and as a user uses 
information for day to day operation and policy making. 
Access to this information is every citizen's right. The right to 
know is the foundation of modem democracy. Now there is 
growing recognition of the importance of information or 
knowledge-based industries to the nation's economic well-being. 
Spatial information on the web has important role in improving 
public access to environmental and other data, and involvement 
in decision making. The rising public demand for access to 
government information gives rise to a strong opportunity to 
build a national Clearinghouse. Facilitating public access to 
spatial information is a key National Information Infrastructure 
requirement. National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) 
addresses issues pertaining to spatial information within the 
conceptual framework of National Information Infrastructure. 
There is a need to increase the awareness of the value, use and 
management of spatial data among governmental agencies; 
fostering development of a variety of educational and training 
opportunities to increase the awareness and understanding of 
the vision, concepts and benefits of NSDI, and to improve the 
collection, management and use of spatial data. 
4.1 National Spatial Data Infrastructure 
The idea of national spatial data infrastructure tries to make a 
linkage among important factors such as policies, organizations, 
data, technologies, standards, delivery mechanism and financial 
and human resources in order to facilitate access of all 
interested people to geo-information. Establishment of such an 
infrastructure is a step by step process and it may consist of 
several components. The key components of a national spatial 
data infrastructure can be summarized as follows: 
Organizational structure reform 
Establishing national standards 
Providing fundamental data and associated metadata 
Establishing national network 
Creating a national framework for training and education 
Establishing national clearinghouse 
Creating a framework for data sharing and partnership 
Designing standard services 
It should be considered that national Spatial Data Clearinghouse 
is an important component of the National Spatial Data 
Infrastructure (NSDI). The Clearinghouse provides a pathway 
to find information about spatial data available in the country. 
Clearinghouse uses the Internet infrastructure, including the 
international standard and other standards. Locator records 
maintained by Clearinghouse will be reviewed for accuracy at