A modelling framework for the study of Spatial Data Infrastructures applied to coastal management and planning

ABSTRACT

The continuous development of Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) provides a favourable context for environmental management and planning. However, it appears that the actual contribution of SDIs should also depend on the correlation between users’ expectations and the services delivered to them. Several studies have addressed some organizational, methodological and technological aspects of the development of SDIs. However, only a few studies have, to the best of our knowledge, studied SDI use at large. This article introduces a methodological approach oriented towards the study of the relationship between SDIs and the users interacting with them as part of their professional practices. Our study is applied to coastal zone management and planning in France. This approach combines structural and data flow modelling. The former is based on Social Network Analysis (SNA) and the latter on Data Flow Diagrams (DFD). This modelling approach has been applied to an online questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. The results identify the SDIs, geographical data flows and institutional levels implied in French coastal zone management and planning.

KEYWORDS:

• Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI)
• coastal stakeholders
• SDIs use
• Social Network Analysis (SNA)
• Data Flow Diagram (DFD)

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the participants of the online questionnaire and interviews as well as the support of the French Association for Geographical Information (AFIGEO) for the distribution of the questionnaire. We are grateful to Cyril Marechal and Alexander Böhm for their contribution to the SNA approach. Finally, the authors also thank the anonymous reviewers and Prof. Robert Weibel for their valuable comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The network and structural components of SNA representation have been implemented on top of the SNA software UCINET and NETDRAW (http://www.analytictech.com/).

2. The DFD approach is implemented with the software DIA (http://dia-installer.de/).

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