Overview
The 1980s marked the occasion when Geographical
Information System (GIS) technology was fully introduced
into the geo-spatial community. This technology quickly
disseminated into many sectors, including academia.
It has now become established as an important research
tool across multiple academic disciplines.
The broad acceptance of this new technology
and the nature of its functionality, has meant that
numerous datasets have been created over the course
of 15 years by many academic departments and research
institutes. Most of these datasets have been created
independently, and without any formal documentation
systems in place.
The fact that numerous undocumented geo-spatial datasets
exist within the community poses many risks: undocumented
dataset files may be misplaced and made redundant; if
familiarity with a dataset is lost then time and costs
must be assumed for any dataset reassessments. The absence
of a formal documentation system also means that datasets
cannot be revealed to the wider geo-spatial community,
therefore limiting other researchers’ access to the
original dataset developers as well as to the datasets
themselves. It also prevents other potential users from
augmenting or complementing their own datasets for various
applications. The absence of information about existing
datasets can lead other organisations to expend considerable
time and costs in producing data that are already in
existence, but at an undisclosed location.
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