Al-Madīnah al-Munawarah in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, has set a high-level commitment to establish local SDI in compliance with Saudi National level SDI initiatives.  It is primarily developed to support the urban planning activities of the Al Madinah Development Authority. As a win-win Situation, MDA supports other local government agencies with common data content standards and guidelines that are prepared as part of the SDI. Technical support is also given to these agencies for generating and maintaining spatial data sets in comply with the data standardization framework prepared for the MSDI. The approach has made MDA as the nodal SDI agency and hence spearhead entire SDI developmental activities in the province. In the past, government entities in the province have invested heavily in GIS technology and geospatial data to meet their own organizational needs. It is, however, now in an excellent position to leverage that investment by establishing the necessary institutional capabilities that are needed to support more effective sharing and utilization of spatial data.

MSDI is now empowering government and academic community with more than 100 map layers such as cadastral data, ortho-imagery, elevation data, transportation, land use, soils, utility networks, etc. Some of these entities have already established transaction-based data maintenance that ensures most updated spatial data and delivered to the MSDI community in a timely manner through the MSDI geo-portal. All the layers that are maintained in the common data model have some level of metadata that is accessible through the geo-portal. Also detailed description of these layers is maintained in the form of Data Dictionary. ISO metadata standards are used for maintaining the metadata sets.

Uniqueness of the MSDI is its approach in empowering spatial data consuming agencies such as ‘Schools’, ‘Hospitals’, ‘Religious establishments’, etc. Necessary tools are provided in the portal for these agencies with high-quality spatial data that enable them in geo-referencing rich set of attributes data maintained by these agencies. The entire development of the SDI was achieved through private partnership.

The ultimate goal of MSDI is to create a seamless network of interoperable geospatial portal that will provide easy access to all geospatial information in the emirate. The essential value of MDSDI is widely recognized across the community, and huge cost savings are already being realized in several ways. All spatial data maintained by organizations for their own business purposes is now standardized according to the broader needs of the community. This lead to improved and newer usages of the data, thereby leveraging the value of the data investment.  The paper deals with the methods, approaches, techniques and tools adopted for the implantation of MSDI for local SDI community in Al Madinah that is emerging as standard practices for NSDI in the Kingdom.