Geospatial information needs national strategy

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The Government must establish a national strategy in the area of ​​Geo-spatial information, associated with the Technological Plan, in which the criteria for using the data are defined that enable the effective integration of all information that is continuously produced, in a dispersed way, in the various organisms of Public Administration, advises a working group of the Association for the Promotion of the Development of the Information Society (APDSI), in the report «Geo-Competitive», recently made known.

Produced over a year, the document identified barriers and opportunities in the use of Geo-spatial information and in the words of Mário Rui Gomes, coordinator of the working group, it intends to be «the beginning of a wake-up call» for something to be done in this area, «under penalty of Portugal losing the competitive ‘war’», he said during the presentation of the report.

In the opinion of the APDSI working group, the paradigm of the use of Geo-spatial information should be based on principles such as making information available to citizens at low cost, the dissemination of metadata, the development of competitiveness-generating «products», such as Multi-functional Register or the National Address Base and the availability of decision support information, in real time, namely of statistical and meteorological indicators.

The strategy to be implemented should include the presentation of useful information about the national territory, «in a simple, structured and transversal way to all areas of socio-economic activity», advises Geo-Competitivo, arguing that this «simplicity» and «normalization» «in the access to Geo-spatial information will rationalize the investments made in the past by the Portuguese State in Geo-spatial information.

Facilitated and structured access to information can also serve as a catalyst for economic activity, «because it exponentially increases the transparency of various Administrative acts, mitigating powers built on ‘encrypted’ information and, consequently, contributing to release energies that break down various barriers that today are raise the national competitiveness «, can be read in the report.

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