Front page    Table of Contents   Abstract Chapters  1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   Bibliography

What does it take to share geographic information? Such sharing would seem especially fruitful in the arena of environmental protection and policy, where key decision variables are often linked by physical pathways (waterways, land-forms, habitat) that traverse jurisdictions, industries, hierarchies, and other territorial lines. Geographic information would seem especially conducive to sharing, due to the high cost of producing it, its potential for widespread re-use, its value in spatial-analytical overlays, and its often unique role in organizational structures. Also, the coming-of-age of the Internet and increasingly sophisticated network software ought to make geographic information sharing especially easy, convenient, and powerful.

Yet it’s unusual to see planners or public managers meaningfully sharing information across organizational boundaries. The reasons for this would seem to be part technical, and part organizational, and often peculiar to the nature of geographic information: complex in structure and interpretation, rich in meaningful inter-relationships, and difficult to understand or use without special-purpose tools.

An important solution to this dilemma may be a geographic information infrastructure—that is, an ongoing, multi-purpose mechanism created to help members of participating organizations make use of each other’s geographic information. Learning how to design and grow such infrastructures, within a rapidly evolving technological and organizational context, seems key to effective inter-agency collaboration and sharing of geographic information. This dissertation examines the design and growth of organizational and technological infrastructures for sharing geographic information. To remain grounded in real organizational experience, yet sensitive to rapidly changing technology, the research takes a hybrid approach, which draws both on social / behavioral perspectives and on GIS technology, standards, and networking.

Chapter 2 presents these various perspectives as they relate to the question of building and sustaining geographic information infrastructures. Chapter 3 explains the methods I followed for my "hybrid" study comprised of organizational case studies and software prototype development. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 then describe three case studies of existing inter-organizational infrastructures for sharing geographic and other information. Chapter 7 follows up with a synthesis that analyzes findings across the three cases in several passes, for an understanding at several different levels. Chapter 8 takes a very different angle on the same topic: it reports on a year-long effort to create a networked service for digital orthophotos, and traces the implications of that effort for the design and growth of geographic information infrastructures. Finally, Chapter 9 draws on the preceding organizational and technological findings to sketch more general implications for technology, organizations, and policy, and directions for future research.

Front page    Table of Contents   Abstract Chapters  1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   Bibliography