The EcoGeo Cookbook for the Assessment of Geographic Information Value

The EcoGeo II project has, as its main goal, the establishment of an economic model to evaluate geographic information (GI). The first phase of the EcoGeo Project has provided a visual representation, called Socioscope, of the overall flows of geospatial data between the main private and public stakeholders of the geomatic sector in the province of Quebec (Canada). From this foundation, EcoGeo Phase II was launched in 2008 with several goals. The first goal was to analyze the most important existing research and approaches to evaluate the economic value of the GI sector. The results show that the value chain concept is, in theory, one of the most suitable approaches that can be adapted to assess GI value, but also one of the most complex due to the number of variables involved with how GI is produced and used within and between organizations. Our second goal was to define the basis or conventions for evaluating GI and, more specifically, to develop a list of parameters which need to be considered for evaluating GI. We defined a set of guidelines that we called the EcoGeo cookbook, which aims at identifying, listing and describing the most important variables and attributes relating to GI value which have been identified in literature. These attributes relate to how GI is produced and used (value of the location attribute, time dependency, quality, etc.), the costs of the GI product (i.e. transaction costs) and the price definition (based on value pricing strategy). Caution must be used when evaluating intangible benefits, which are less easily estimated than tangible ones. The final goal will be to implement such variables and attributes into the Socioscope’s database structure. This will also allow for the definition of a specific value chain for the GI sector in Quebec.