Soaring spaces : the development of an integrated terrestrial and bathymetric information system for the Maltese Islands

Abstract

In a rapidly developing world where the introduction of massive online information systems has enabled both the scientist and the general public to interact with remotely- located data from across the globe, the reality of access to data and eventually to information is slowly bringing forth the realisation that decades-old barriers to access to data still need to be overcome. Data availability suffers from a plethora of scourges that have left entire countries with a dearth of reliable baseline information, particularly small states which have limited human capacity to manage the whole datacycle in the physical, social and environmental domains. The main limitations include the fact that there are few homogeneous structures in operation, which governance situation has rendered data gathering agencies as a series of independent hoarding kingdoms, where data ‘ownership’ is seen as a private not as a corporate or a national affair thus the main users instead of being custodians transform themselves as the private owners of such data. Other more technical issues include the fact that there are too many standards to follow, data is not dynamic (gathered ad hoc as a one-off and not real-time), data is not quality assured/controlled, queries are not organised and recorded, data is not secured – (‘illegal’ use of storage on personal storage devices and other digital media) and that versioning is not practiced. In addition, even where the data is available, there is an upsurge in requests for access to such data which has increased drastically since TIM BERNERS-LEE’S (1989) world wide web (WWW) proposal changed society as never before. The WWW changed a medium that was at best techno-centric to one that is now essentially socio-technic. Increasing requirements for bandwidth has resulted in a need for a reanalysis of DAHRENDORFF’s (1990) access issue in contemporary worlds, both real and virtual, where not all society has access to the information through on-line services.