Interoperating Giss Report of a Specialist Meeting Held under the Auspices of the Varenius Project Panel on Computational Implementations of Geographic Concepts

The rapid development of communication and computing technology is changing the way scientific information is created, disseminated, managed, and used. A new scientific information infrastructure is emerging, one that enables unprecedented access to distributed information resources along with electronic peer to peer communication. Geographic information scientists are likely to be at the forefront of this new infrastructure with the development of globally integrated geospatial digital libraries. These geolibraries promise to boost scientific innovation, productivity, and returns on investment. They also pose technical and organizational interoperability challenges that must be resolved. A research agenda examining the integrated technical and organizational dimensions of interoperability for geographic information is needed. Such research would advance the development of digital libraries, federated databases, and geospatial data infrastructures. Technical and organizational interoperability challenges in geoprocessing The interoperability issues of the geographic information community are both technical and organizational in nature. As defined by Litwin (1990), and paraphrased by the UCGIS: "interoperability generally refers to a bottom-up integration of pre-existing systems and applications that were not intended to be integrated but are systematically combined to address problems that require multiple DBMS and application programs" (UCGIS 1996, p. 1). As the importance of sharing information across organizational computing environments is recognized, data interoperability becomes paramount. Effective communication and transfer of geographic information requires that organizations resolve interoperability of data models and components across organizational boundaries and applications. Organizations have evolved their own systems, legacy databases, and applications to serve internal needs. This has resulted in data models and applications uniquely tailored to meet specific internal requirements. The interoperability of geographic information across systems and platforms is also an organizational issue. Traditionally, government geospatial data suppliers have operated under centralized and hierarchical organizational structures to serve bounded communities of users with unique semantic and conceptual requirements (e.g. military, resource agencies, transportation agencies). This hierarchical framework has resulted in closed, proprietary, and centralized geoprocessing services. Increasingly, however, there is an urgent need to access distributed information from many organizations to address boundary-spanning problems such as: disaster relief, environmental monitoring, interagency coordination, joint force deployment, and provision of integrated geospatial mapping services over the Internet. The need to enable information exchange across between hierarchical tiers and across organizational boundaries calls for a better understanding of intertwined technical and organizational processes.