Chapter 3. Requirements and Constraints
28 • Integrate with and support widely deployed geographic information sys-
tems GIS • Not be perceived as a competitor to local, regional, or national SDIs
• Need to integrate data platforms operated by national space agencies or other organizations providing satellite-derived data products
3.5 Architecture and Platforms
Architecture and Platform aspects play a key role in distributed spatial data col- lection, exploration, and processing environments; and need to ensure that the
targeted SDI for the Arctic can keep pace with changing technologies and Inter- net trends. The following high level requirements have been identified:
• Development efforts for any SDI could be constrained by how prescrip- tive the architectural design is at the outset. To benefit from rapidly im-
proving technology, an SDI for the Arctic needs to remain agile. Architec- tural decisions affect costs to the participants and the ability to benefit as
technology changes. Early architectural decision can translate into con- straints if they are too rigid in their approach. Therefore, questions such
as these must be addressed: Will the SDI for the Arctic be a loose confed- eration of portals and platforms discoverable by open specifications and
standards allowing as-is communities to participate? Or will the SDI for the Arctic be highly architected and all data and apps services be available
as hostedre-hosted services cloud andor on-premise? Or any combi- nation of the two approaches?
• Multi-linguism and technical language requirements should be taken into account.
• Technical knowledge and availability of skills is often a limiting factor in stakeholders adopting technical solutions, or in continuing efforts to
maintain solutions already in place. The architecture has to cater for greatly varying paces at which organizations adapt new technology and will have
to bridge a wide variety of technical solutions of differing ages and plat- forms.
• An SDI for the Arctic shall be very dynamic in contrast to many other SDIs, that tend to be static, because change is occurring at a very high
Chapter 3. Requirements and Constraints
29 rate. New data sets are added and the huge number of monitoring data
sets are updated constantly.
• An SDI for the Arctic should be also designed for no- or low-bandwidth areas where the Internet is not readily available, as bandwidth and limited
connectivity is the single biggest limiter to information in many Arctic areas. Arctic SDI designers must decide if they will provide infrastructure
as well as data and apps. Examples of using data appliances that are loaded with data, software, and apps shall be explored.
• Intuitive site structurenavigation with best practices to lower the entry barrier to SDIs
• Efficient search functionality and fast download rates • Reasonable access and download speeds for northern stakeholders, inter-
operable with existing geospatial systems, clear cataloging and tagging system to promote ease of discovery and reasonable metadata require-
ments.
• The architecture shall allow for future extensions and allow the integra- tion of upcoming new patterns to handle e.g. Big Data or semantic anno-
tation
3.6 Security, Privacy, Safety
