In the increasingly challenging financial circumstances faced by many nations, the need to be able to robustly demonstrate the socio-economic benefits of investment in Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) is becoming a necessity rather than a nicety.  Where Governments are promoting open data (free at the point of use) policies, SDI custodians are further challenged by the need to make the case for increased funding from Government appropriation.

Furthermore, there is a strong body of evidence that many very worthy and important SDI projects are not being approved because the benefits are not being expressed in terms that decision makers, balancing multiple competing priorities across many sectors, understand.

The authors have been heavily involved in many of the recent national efforts to quantify the value of SDI and present them using standard international methodologies adopted for economic and financial appraisals.

The presentation will consider the lessons learned from these, and other studies, particularly in Europe, Australasia and North America and consider how these can be cost-effectively applied to developing countries.

The underlying economic principles considered will include concepts such:

-          What is a public good and what geospatial data types meets the criteria;

-          The apportioned value of information within particular application use cases;

-          Understanding the value chain as information is consumed in an increasingly complex digital environment;

-          Benefits transfer as a technique for establishing value using pre-existing studies in other geographies;

-          The different considerations between benefits realised (ex-post) and predictive (ex-ante) studies

-          Valuing non-market benefits, such as safety, amenity and quality of life.

The methodologies and techniques introduced will include economic welfare analysis, cost-benefit analysis, input-output multipliers, General Equilibrium Modelling, multi-variate analysis, stated preference and revealed preference. The aim will be to explain terms in ways that SDI practitioners can understand and compare the relative merits of methodologies for different types and levels of investment.

This presentation is part of the outreach initiative of the GeoValue community. The GeoValue community, with sponsorship from organisations such as NASA, USGS, JRC and EuroSDR, hold regular events to promote multi-disciplinary understanding of how to value investment in all types of geospatial system including earth observation, SDI and GIS.