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The world as we know it is changing. Economies world wide are undergoing a process of profound and continuing structural change, and the global village is becoming a reality driven by IT and communication technologies. With this in mind, many countries believe that they can benefit both economically and environmentally from better management of their spatial data assets by taking a perspective that starts at a local level and proceeds through state, national and regional levels to global level. This has resulted in the development of the Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) concept at these levels.

SDI is fundamentally about facilitation and coordination of the exchange and sharing of spatial data between stakeholders from different jurisdictional levels in the spatial data community. Understanding of its role and nature are important to the acceptance of the concept and its alignment with spatial industry objectives.