Geospatial Data Infrastructures and Ocean Governance

As trite as it may sound, everything has a location. The issue with geospatial information and technologies is that more locations and applications relate to the Earth’s brown and green surfaces, and built environments, rather than to the blue ocean. This fundamental issue of disproportionate data collection, analysis, and use is at the heart of a tremendous growth in new applications and data created within the ocean domain. From a marine spatial planning perspective, it also forms the need for ocean governance through data sharing and scientific communication. The driving forces of the new era of ocean geospatial development are climate change, resource use/depletion, and geopolitical conflicts. The greatest benefit of geospatial technology and analysis is that these forces can be viewed as they occur in reality, as interconnected and overlapping problems that have spatial extents, as well as spatial causes and solutions. Ocean governance happens somewhere, within situations having locations, movements, and interactions. Whether it be political, technical or natural, location is central, and so location-based technologies and geospatial data must be at the core of any analysis or policy associated with governance.1 Geospatial data infrastructures are expressions of policies and products. Data management is the essential, but not sole, product component. Within this are related issues of connectivity (bandwidth), security, metadata, software, storage, preservation, open access, privacy, and cloud computing, to name a few. Processes of collecting, sharing, and communicating geospatial data are changing radically, thereby forcing a reflection on the policies and products. This will continue to have an enormous impact on ocean governance as it gets to the core of management issues preceding decision-making. The entire system of geospatial data and technology has for some time been defined as spatial data infrastructures (sdi). From data collection to metadata, format integration, distributed computer interaction, software, storage,