The past 15 years SDI’s have been developed, come into operation and matured. At the same time we have witnessed the emergence and coming of age of the information society. SDI’s have originally been designed from an infrastructural perspective, whereas the information society is closer to a network based approach.

The good news is that location information is an accepted and much used part of the information society. In the eGovernment of the Netherlands half of the key registers have a location component. Our new national Environmental Protection Act will see a full (spatial) digital implementation. Moreover users are spatially enabled and increasingly the internet of Things (IoT) also make devices and sensors location based.

At the same time putting geodata on the web means that SDI’s enter into mainstream data infrastructures. We will discuss our experiences in our extended use of spatial information based on the SDI approach. Especially in the public domain there is still a need to work within a well defined spatial data infrastructure. Not only at the national level, but also in our regional (European) context where INSPIRE is still a forceful stimulus of opening up spatial data. At the same time we are increasingly working in a generic data and network-environment instead of a dedicated SDI. For the time being we will service both worlds, but we think that in the long run spatial will still be special as a data type, but not special as a data element. This gives us the opportunity to make our offering even more spatially enabled.