A Review of SDI Literature: Searching for Signs of Inverse Infrastructures
ISBN 978-85-88783-11-9
Authors
1Coetzee, S.; 2Wolff-piggott, B.
1UNIVERSITY OF PRETORIA Email: serena.coetzee@up.ac.za
2UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN Email: brendonwp@gmail.com
Abstract
Many of today’s infrastructures, such as railways and electricity utilities, originate from the 1800s and evolved into public services with centralized bureaucratic operations subject to government regulation, termed large-scale technical systems (LTS). In contrast, inverse infrastructures are user-driven, self-organizing infrastructures with decentralized governance where development is influenced from the bottom-up. In this article a lon-gitudinal review of peer-reviewed SDI research is presented in search of signs of inverse infrastructures in SDIs and SDI research. The quantitative review showed that SDI research publications increased dramatically dur-ing the last decade. Predominantly, SDIs are researched empirically and the majority of publications focus on technology prototypes and proof-of-concept implementations. Research on ‘soft’ aspects of SDIs and case study approaches are much less well represented, and conceptual and theoretical studies receive least attention. Publications about SDI initiatives spanning multiple countries have increased, while the number of publications from the local or municipal perspective is converging to zero. The last few years have also seen a huge increase in SDI literature in the earth observation domain. A qualitative review of the literature further shows that SDIs are evolving from top-down, centralized government funded initiatives into decentralized and bottom-up initiatives, but most SDIs are not yet self-organizing and user-driven systems. The findings suggest that cartogra-phers and researchers concerned with SDI should pay more attention to the development of standards and software tools in support of self-organizing and user-driven SDIs, as well as appropriate governance mechanisms.
Keywords
spatial data infrastructure; governance; literature review