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

1. Overview

A priori, the problem of geographic information sharing would seem to be part technical, part organizational, and often tied to the nature of the information and its use. The following paragraphs present definitions of information sharing and infrastructures, and trace several related lines of research, from sociological variance and process theories to interoperability, standards, and the coming-of-age of Internet tools and services. These are tied together by a research perspective based on structuration, which helps to interpret the case study findings and prototype results and to draw useful lessons for technological and organizational infrastructure design.

2. Concept Definitions

What is meant by information sharing, anyway? And what role do infrastructures play? Before reviewing related theories and research, it helps to clarify the meaning of these two key terms.

a. Various conceptions of sharing

"Sharing" can mean a great many things to people. In principle at least, everyone is in favor of it; it’s a lesson we learn in kindergarten: "Share everything. Play fair. Don’t hit people" (Fulghum, 1987). Roget’s Thesaurus (Longman, 1994) associates the word "shared" with activities which are in common, cooperative, or participatory, and with entities that are merged, composite, coincident, in partnership, or "in the same boat." When it comes to sharing information, related words include "notification," "exchange," "pooling," and "dissemination." Carter (1992) contrasts two kinds of information sharing in particular: the buying and selling of information products, and the use of multipurpose information by members of a partnership. Tosta (1992) emphasizes non-commercial "vertical" relationships (as between local, state, and federal government) and "horizontal" relationships (linking organizational "peers" such as adjacent cities). Frank (1992) takes a more conceptual view, suggesting that "the specific problem of sharing data is […] to communicate meaning in a situation where the perceived reality differs because the two organizations have different goals and work on different tasks."

This research examines information sharing among organizations with overlapping geographic areas of interest. This is not really "vertical" sharing because the participants don’t necessarily include, constitute, or report to each other; some are even in different countries. Neither is it "horizontal" sharing: participants span a variety of levels, from towns and schools to state offices, regional associations, and federal agencies. The sharing relationship generally links groups that have different goals and tasks, but whose concern for a valuable shared natural resource encourages them to work together, to coordinate their efforts, to learn from each other, and to build some kind of infrastructure to facilitate these activities.

b. Information sharing infrastructures

Most often, information sharing occurs in an ad hoc fashion, via methods that are devised anew with each interchange: that is, single-use, single-purpose mechanisms. However, as the volume and frequency of information sharing grows, a more permanent mechanism often becomes beneficial, one that can function repeatedly and serve a variety of purposes. This multi-use, multi-purpose mechanism is what I have termed an information sharing infrastructure. Some use the word "infrastructure" in a specific technical sense, to mean "the basic facilities, services, and installations needed for the functioning of a community or society, such as transportation and communications systems, water and power lines, and public institutions including schools, post offices, and prisons" (Houghton-Mifflin, 1992). Others define it quite broadly, as "the underlying foundation or basic framework of a system or organization" (Merriam-Webster, 1990). The U.S. National Telecommunications Infrastructure Administration uses the following definition:

The telecommunication networks, computers, other end-user devices, software, standards, and skills that collectively enable people to connect to each other and to a vast array of services and information resources" (NTIA, 1996).

(…) (1) standards to facilitate data collection, documentation, access, and transfer; (2) a basic framework of digital geospatial data that meets the minimum needs of large numbers of data users over any given geographic area; (3) a clearinghouse to serve, search, query, find, access, and use geospatial data; and (4) education and training in the collection, management, and use of geospatial data. (Tosta, 1994)

The information sharing infrastructures I refer to in this study roughly follow the NSDI definition above, though at a regional, rather than a national, scale. An information-sharing infrastructure, as described here, links organizations with separate goals and tasks by means of standards, navigation and conversion tools, shared "framework" information, and institutional structures such as partnerships. A central question of my research is how best to design, build, maintain, and grow such infrastructures for effective geographic information sharing in support of environmental policy, planning, and management.

3. Related research

Several areas of recent research provide guidance for building and maintaining infrastructures for geographic information sharing. The next few paragraphs outline organizational and technological aspects of geographic information sharing, which together provide a useful language to describe and compare the design choices and development styles adopted in the various cases, and to formulate useful prescriptions for the future. The review of these research areas is followed by a research perspective which emphasizes their reciprocal influence on each other.

a. Organizational aspects of geographic information sharing

Organizational aspects of information sharing can be drawn from the large body of literature on collaboration, consensus building, and coordination. Much of this literature emphasizes a variance model which assumes that changing the levels of certain input factors leads, by some functional relationship, to variations in performance outcomes. The following paragraphs contrast this approach with a process model, which traces micro-level decisions over time to explain how observed outcomes come about.

i. Factors in information sharing, consensus, and coordination

The picture is no less complex within the specific area of geographic information sharing. For instance, Rhind (1992) has argued that effective information sharing depends on its appropriate pricing — in contrast with Epstein (1995), who states that free dissemination is what’s needed. At the level of inter-organizational relationships, information sharing may be facilitated by negotiation (Obermeyer, 1995), a common, "super-ordinate" goal (Pinto and Onsrud, 1995), a "killer application" (Brodie, 1993), and clear data ownership (Carter, 1992). Technical abilities in an organization can make a big difference, for example when organizations make quick technical choices to support limited internal purposes (Craig, 1995) or rely on inadequately trained staff (August, 1991).

ii. Processes of information sharing, consensus, and coordination

b. Technological aspects of geographic information sharing

Technological aspects of information sharing are the subject of a diverse array of recent research in multi-database theory, standards, and distributed data networks.

i. Levels of connectivity: physical, logical, semantic

ii. Standards, metadata, and non-intrusive sharing

iii. Network tools and network management

c. Interdependence of organizational and technological aspects

Sharing geographic information is often characterized as either a technological problem or an organizational one. For example, an agency may not make use of an outside data source for lack of suitable data-conversion software or a means to search through reams of unknown data; but information sharing is often seen as impeded by "turf battles," institutional inertia, or unclear intellectual property. In response, most researchers have focused on either the technical or the organizational topics described above. These focused research efforts are valuable in their own right; but in an unsettled, rapidly changing technological and organizational context, sharing geographic information is rarely a purely technical problem or a purely organizational one (Evans and Ferreira, 1995). For instance, the apparent "inertia" that hinders the use of outside geographic data may in fact be a quite sensible response to difficult data-coordination problems intimately tied to current technology and to the complexity of the data itself. Conversely, technical innovations such as search engines or data-conversion interfaces may only affect information sharing in an organization that encourages its members to explore new approaches to their work.

The use of geographic information can have its own peculiar influence on organizations, for two reasons. First, as Goodchild (1992) articulates, "what distinguishes spatial data is the fact that the spatial key is based on two continuous dimensions." Consequently, using geographic information usually requires interpolating values between known data points: a matter of interpretation and analysis, quite different from simply looking up alphanumeric information in relational data tables. Second, Chorley (1988) and others note that geographic information is most useful when it is linked or merged with other geographic information, and that most geographic information is used for more than one purpose. This makes it hard to anticipate and codify how geographic data are retrieved, combined, and used, and it blurs the distinction between information managers, analysts, and users. This would tend to contradict most hierarchical, departmental organizational structures, and encourage more fluid, overlapping task-oriented structures.

In describing the relation between technologies and organizations, Markus and Robey (1988) emphasize an emergent perspective, focused on the interaction between organizations and technology, in contrast with both a technological determinism (in which technologies are presumed to have known, inexorable effects on organizations) or a social strategic choice (in which technologies are seen as inexorably shaped by organizational intentions and actions). Barley (1986) invokes structuration theory (Giddens, 1984) to trace the ongoing, recursive influence between an organization’s rules and resources and the behavior of its members, as triggered by new technologies. Using the structuration perspective, DeSanctis and Poole (1994) emphasize the "intertwined" nature of technological and behavioral patterns, and Orlikowski (1992) proposes a useful view of technology as a malleable structural property of organizations. That is, within a structuration perspective, organizational intentions alone cannot give rise to a given technology, nor can a technology have a fully predictable effect on organizations. Rather, in every phase of a technology’s existence — its conception, design, deployment, use, evaluation, and modification — the human actors involved mediate both causal effects in unpredictable ways.

This perspective seems like a useful one for the study of complex phenomena such as inter-organizational information sharing, collaboration, or consensus: it enables the study of technological and organizational aspects in concert, rather than in isolation from each other. Accordingly, this research examines both technological and organizational design choices and contexts; their mutual interaction; and their joint relationship to planning and policy. Furthermore, within this perspective, the technical design of an information sharing infrastructure cannot be evaluated apart from its implementation and use within a group of organizations. Thus, any solutions considered here should be conceived as packages of mutually-influencing technological and organizational features, and as pathways of not-fully-predictable growth and change over time.

d. Organizational and technological change

Indeed, not only do technologies and organizations have a mutual, recursive influence on each other, but they both tend to undergo continual or periodic change. Yet designers of information systems often make the more-or-less tacit assumption that organizations are static — that structural changes are abnormal and reach an equilibrium. Conversely, organizational thinking often tends to accept technologies as artifacts with a fixed role and stable features. However, particularly as seen through the structuration perspective described previously, social structures undergo constant change, and information technology itself is an element of that social structure, enabling some actions, constraining others, and itself shaped by those very actions over time (Orlikowski, 1992). Particularly in the case of large information networks, this perspective implies "organic, yet systematic" change over time, as Spackman (1990) notes in his discussion of networked organizations:

Our road and rail networks and the international telephone network have grown organically, yet systematically, over many, many years. The integrated corporate information network is just such an enterprise and, in one sense, it already exists, while in another, it will never be complete. The issue therefore is not how to build such a network, but rather how it is allowed to grow.

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