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A Review of SDI Literature: Searching for Signs of Inverse Infrastructures

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Cartography - Maps Connecting the World

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography ((ICA))

Abstract

Many of today’s infrastructures, such as railways and electricity utilities, originate from the 1800s and evolved into public services with centralized bureaucratic operations subject to government regulation, termed large-scale technical systems (LTS). In contrast, inverse infrastructures are user-driven, self-organizing infrastructures with decentralized governance where development is influenced from the bottom-up. In this chapter, a longitudinal review of peer-reviewed SDI research is presented in search of signs of inverse infrastructures in SDIs and SDI research. The quantitative review showed that SDI research publications increased dramatically during the last decade. Predominantly, SDIs are researched empirically and the majority of publications focus on technology prototypes and proof-of-concept implementations. Research on “soft” aspects of SDIs and case study approaches are much less well represented, and conceptual and theoretical studies receive the least attention. Publications about SDI initiatives spanning multiple countries have increased, while the number of publications from the local or municipal perspective is converging to zero. The last few years have also seen a huge increase in SDI literature in the earth observation domain. A qualitative review of the literature further shows that SDIs are evolving from top-down, centralized government funded initiatives into decentralized and bottom-up initiatives, but most SDIs are not yet self-organizing and user-driven systems. The findings suggest that cartographers and researchers concerned with SDI should pay more attention to the development of standards and software tools in support of self-organizing and user-driven SDIs, as well as appropriate governance mechanisms.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the DST/NRF sponsored intern, Teboho Mokono, who assisted with the literature search, wordless, and density maps.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Geoinformation Science, Department of Geography, Geoinformatics and Meteorology, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa

    Serena Coetzee

  2. Department of Information Systems, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa

    Brendon Wolff-Piggott

Authors
  1. Serena Coetzee
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  2. Brendon Wolff-Piggott
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Serena Coetzee .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Departmento de Geomática, Universidade Federal do Paraná, Curitiba, Brazil

    Claudia Robbi Sluter

  2. Departmento de Geografia, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

    Carla Bernadete Madureira Cruz

  3. Departmento de Geografia, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

    Paulo Márcio Leal de Menezes

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Coetzee, S., Wolff-Piggott, B. (2015). A Review of SDI Literature: Searching for Signs of Inverse Infrastructures. In: Robbi Sluter, C., Madureira Cruz, C., Leal de Menezes, P. (eds) Cartography - Maps Connecting the World. Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17738-0_9

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