National GIS Policy of the United Kingdom （国家地理信息系统联合王国的政策）.docVIP

The National Geographical Information Policy of Britain A.J.Evans, http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/people/a.evans/ Centre for Computational Geography, University of Leeds, Leeds, West Yorkshire, UK. Proceedings of the GIS International Conference / GIS Korea 2006, Seoul, Korea, 17-19 May 2006, p.275-299. In some senses the title of this paper is a misnomer; Britain does not yet, in a coherent sense, have anything approaching a national Geographical Information (GI) policy, let alone a strategy, and, indeed, recent attempts to formulate component parts of such a strategy have largely failed. The irony of this is that Britain has suffered from being “ahead of the game”, that is, the realization of a need for a national policy, and the formulation of a foundation for such a policy, were developed before: current standards and technology; the breadth and magnitude of the problems were really understood by policy makers and the institutions that might tackle them; before those institutions were embedded in an structure appropriate to dealing with them. The subsequent insular behaviour of government institutions; the introduction of internal markets; and the commercialization of key public bodies, has left Britain in a position from which a national policy will be extracted with great difficulty. This paper will review the early movements toward a British GI Strategy, the key players in recent attempts to formulate such a strategy, the problems involved in the formulation, and future directions. National Policy: 1746 – 1999 The most comprehensive datasets on the geography of Britain are held by its public mapping service, the Ordnance Survey (OS). The OS grew out of the government’s quasi-military arm, the Board of Ordnance. The Board saw the usefulness of surveys after maps of the Scottish Highlands commissioned by the king in 1746 were used in tackling civil rebellion (OS, 2006). In 1791 they began a survey of the south coast in preparation for potential invasion by