Standards play an important role in achieving the objectives of a spatial data infrastructure. However, standards can be difficult to understand and implement for those with limited exposure to them. The South African Spatial Data Infrastructure (SASDI) aims to facilitate the capture, management, maintenance, integration, distribution and use of spatial information. To decide whether a SASDI data set is fit for a specific purpose, users need information about its quality. SANS 19157:2014, Geographic information – Data quality, specifies how the quality of geospatial data can be described and assessed. The Committee for Spatial Information (CSI), responsible for implementing SASDI, identified the need to train geospatial data custodians in implementing SANS 19157. While custodians were eager to learn, several barriers prohibited presentation of training in a ‘traditional’ classroom setting. These barriers included the costs and time to travel from remote areas of the country to a training venue and challenges with scheduling the training at a time suitable to all participants. Online training was therefore delivered − however, structured in a way to overcome general ‘online fatigue’ after the pandemic. In this paper we present our experiences in presenting training on SANS 19157 to professionals responsible for geospatial data sets. We also share the lessons learnt from the novel structure for online training.

Abstract. The Commission on SDI & Standards (and its predecessors) of the International Cartographic Association (ICA) has developed formal models of a spatial data infrastructure (SDI), using the viewpoints of the Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP) and the Unified Modeling Language (UML). The Commission described an SDI from the Enterprise Viewpoint (purpose, scope and policies for an SDI), Information Viewpoint (semantics of information and information processing in an SDI) and Computational Viewpoint (functional decomposition of the SDI into a set of services that interact through interfaces). The Enterprise Viewpoint model included six types of stakeholders in an SDI: Policy Maker, Producer, Provider, Broker, Value-added Reseller and End User. Subsequently, the Commission identified 39 sub-types of these stakeholders, though a better description of them might be as specializations, special cases, attributes, activities or roles.We have identified and reviewed all the literature that has referenced the Commission’s papers on the SDI models. Most use the Commission’s papers for the definitions of an SDI and of the parts, processes and stakeholders in an SDI. In this paper, we discuss all those that have applied the ICA SDI stakeholder model, proposed improvements to the model and/or highlighted parts of the model that are not well understood. We also discuss some issues we identified when reviewing the models. Subsequently, we plan on proposing some revisions and expansions on this ICA model of the stakeholders in a spatial data infrastructure.

Abstract. Post-conflict reconstruction includes the removal of land mines and remnants of war. The CSIR conducted field experiments to determine the impact of TNT in the soil on plants as a possible means to detect landmines. All the leaf clip readings were done using a spectrometer to determine reflection and absorption of light at one micrometre intervals between 350 to 2500 micrometre. Laboratory analysis such as UPLC qTOF MS indicated that the TNT have an influence on the plants. Several indices such as Modified Red Edge Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (mNDVI705), Red Edge Position (REP) and Moisture Stress Index (MSI) did not show any significant differences between control plants and experimental plants with different TNT concentrations. Groth’s pattern matching algorithm designed to match several photographs of the same part of the universe. A set of triangles using dominant stars are created for each photograph and matched using an error band. If the selected triangles from the two photographs fit within the error band, then they are from the same section of the universe. Bands for the Pléiades instruments were simulated using the data from the spectrometer for each plant. The reflectance value of the band and the normalised midpoint wavelength of each Pléiades band were used to construct the triangles. The control plant triangle is then matched with the experimental plant and if the triangles do not match, then the effect of TNT on the plant is significant. The initial results with the control plants and experimental plants are positive.

The benefits of free and open‐source software for geographical information systems, such as QGIS, are appreciated by many all over the world. However, QGIS adoption in South Africa is not primarily influenced by the benefits attributed to open‐source software, such as cost benefits, customizability, improved reliability, quality and security. In the first paper from this study, it was found that habit, followed by facilitating conditions, price value and social influence, had the greatest influence on the behavioural intention of members from South Africa's geospatial community to use QGIS. In this article, several hypotheses were developed and tested to investigate the role that moderators (age, gender, GIS experience, educational level and registration with the South African Geomatics Council) had on the behavioural intention of geospatial practitioners in South Africa to use QGIS. Results show that GIS experience, educational level and registration with the South African professional body for geomatics practitioners had a moderation effect on some of the hypothesized relationships, while age and gender did not have any significant effect. Results also show that as one gains experience, social influence and facilitating conditions are less important when deciding to use QGIS; a postgraduate education and professional registration increase appreciation for getting value for money; and registered professionals are not significantly influenced by the perceptions of others when deciding to use QGIS. Habit is not influenced by any of the moderators, suggesting that breaking the habit of using a particular product is a challenge regardless of age, gender, experience, education level or registration status. These results are useful for developers of any GIS product and for choosing a GIS product for an organization, because they explain which user characteristics influence behavioural intention to use a specific GIS product.

Many municipalities in South Africa, especially those in rural areas, do not have the resources to maintain the geospatial information required to deliver essential services. Conversely, National Geo-spatial Information (NGI), the national mapping agency (NMA), captures data themes required by municipalities but not at scales suitable for municipal purposes. In 2003, the South African Spatial Data Infrastructure (SASDI) was initiated through national legislation as the 'national technical, institutional and policy framework' to govern public geospatial information. However, involvement of the country's more than 250 municipalities in SASDI has been limited. In order to better understand the role of municipalities in the development and implementation of SASDI, we reviewed this over four periods: (1) before 1994, i.e., before the new Constitution of South Africa came into force; (2) 1994 to 2000, when the idea of an SDI emerged through voluntary participation; (3) 2000 to 2009, when the SASDI legislation was enacted but nothing really happened; and (4) from 2010 to date, starting with the first meeting of the Committee for Spatial Information, the SASDI coordinating body. The review confirms that unless SASDI steps in to provide coordination mechanisms between different spheres of government, the NMA will continue to supply unsuitable data and municipalities will be left to their own devices. A SASDI that caters for diverse user needs through bottom-up influences could greatly improve local municipalities' service delivery. We have used the results of our study to propose a governance framework where all spheres of government are involved in SASDI and municipalities have an opportunity to communicate their data needs from the bottom, upward.

We conducted a study to find out whether and why South African users accepted QGIS. In the quantitative part of the study, we found that QGIS acceptance is primarily influenced by habit, followed by facilitating conditions, price value, and social influence. To better understand and explain these results, we conducted a qualitative study in which semi‐structured interviews were conducted with 12 geospatial practitioners. While a geographic information system (GIS) product was often prescribed by their workplace, interviewees had clear preferences for a specific GIS product for certain kinds of tasks, supporting the finding that habit is the main reason for using a GIS product. Interviewees used QGIS because it opens most data formats and there is one license for all functionality (facilitating conditions), is free (price value), and/or had been advised by someone important (social influence). The interviews revealed why software support (commercial or free) was not significant in the quantitative results: users think GIS support is not necessary or else available online. Identical to the quantitative study, interviews confirmed that customizability, no vendor lock‐in, improved reliability, quality, and security do not play a role when deciding to use QGIS. These qualitative results provide a deeper understanding of the quantitative results and can be used by promotors of open‐source geospatial software to increase uptake. In general, they can also help managers embed new products into any organization's workflows. In our study, interviewees and questionnaire respondents were selected to be users. Repeating the study for GIS developers and/or managers will provide further insight into QGIS acceptance.

Geospatial information and technologies are widely used in South Africa, initially mostly with proprietary software but today, mature, open source alternatives such as QGIS are available. We wanted to find out if and why South African users accepted QGIS, globally the most widely used free and open source GIS. We adapted the extended unified theory of acceptance and use of technology model to test several hypotheses regarding the acceptance and use of QGIS in South Africa. 205 registered members of the Geo‐Information Society of South Africa completed a structured questionnaire. Results show that habit has the most significant influence on behavioural intention to use QGIS, followed by facilitating conditions, price value and social influence. Performance expectancy, effort expectancy, hedonic motivation and access to source code played no significant role. The findings show that adoption of QGIS in South Africa is not primarily influenced by benefits attributed to open source software, such as cost benefits, customizability, improved reliability, quality and security. The results are useful for developers of any GIS product and for choosing a GIS product for an organization, because they provide insight into the behavioural intentions of users.

The Digital Earth vision foresees the availability and accessibility of geospatial information to achieve the goals of sustainable development, economic growth and social well-being. In the case of urban areas, up-to-date geospatial information is essential for managing a city towards achieving these goals. The rapid shift from rural to urban areas globally puts pressure on local governments and they often struggle to find and organise the resources required to collect and maintain geospatial information that can help to address urban growth challenges. A spatial data infrastructure (SDI) can facilitate the availability and accessibility of geospatial information towards addressing national objectives, however, the involvement of local governments in an SDI can be a challenge. In this paper, we critique the role of municipalities against the backdrop of the developments of the South African SDI (SASDI) to date. The critique identifies five high-level shortcomings of the SASDI that have led to the limited participation of municipalities. Based on the shortcomings, we provide recommendations for capacitating municipalities through SASDI so that the Digital Earth vision can also be achieved for municipalities. These recommendations are aimed at involving the local sphere of government in a national SDI and are equally applicable to other countries.

This chapter presents the Coronavirus disease "(COVID-19) Vulnerability Dashboard" for South Africa, developed by the CSIR for the National Disaster Management Centre (NDMC). Released in 2019, the Green Book is an online planning support tool providing quantitative scientific evidence on the likely impacts climate change will have on South Africa at the local authority level. Since 1994, South Africa has had a constitutional, multiparty democracy with three spheres of government: national, provincial and local. South Africa has nine provinces and 8 metropolitan (metro), 44 district and 205 local municipalities. The mid-year estimate for 2020 for the population of was 59.62 million, with about 51,1% being female, about 28,6% being aged younger than 15 years and about 9,1% being 60 years or older. The Green Book has been flexible enough to be adapted for other types of disasters, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

Johannesburg, the Gauteng Provincial Government and organised local government in Gauteng (SALGA).'state spatial selectivity'.In other words, this scale has been specifically chosen or assembled by the state to facilitate various processes such as economic agglomeration or competitiveness (Brenner cited in Wu, 2017, p. 1135).In other contexts, the scale has been asserted as a way to mitigate the negative effects of inter-locality competition (ibid).Regardless of the deliberative processes behind this 're-scaling', the city-region is not a straightforward site in which to organise governance.As Storper (2014) points out, governance at this scale necessarily involves many large, contested and intertwined issues that arise as a result of strong interdependencies and cleavages, combined with fragmented geographies and overlapping implementing agencies.This means that the issues that become the object of regional governance are not amenable to a 'solution' so much as a haphazard muddling through.Similarly, Wu (2017) interprets the state spatial selectivity of the city-region form less as a proactive model to manage social provision or promote democratisation, but rather as an attempt to manage intractable crises.The Gauteng City-Region (GCR) is increasingly recognised in official and other discourse.That said, the acknowledgement of something that can be described as a city-region has not resulted in consensus on what this means, or should mean, for planning, public investment or governance.This series of GCRO Provocations examines different aspects of governance of and in the GCR.Taken together, they hope to trigger debate and dialogue on various complexities of the issue, and signal a series of priorities for consideration in thinking about the future and the fortunes of the city-region.

Publicly-available mobile data can be used to derive fine grain commuting and travel patterns. These types of data include geocoded or geotagged discrete units of communication: messages, posts, tweets, status updates, check-ins, images and the like on a variety of social networking services. Clearly, there are ethical issues concerning the use of such data, particularly the invasion of privacy. A review of the literature has been done to explore these issues.

In this study, we model the risk of robbery in the City of Tshwane in South Africa. We use the collective knowledge of two prominent spatial theories of crime (social disorganization theory, and crime pattern theory) to guide the selection of data and employ rudimentary geospatial techniques to create a crude model that identifies the risk of future robbery incidents in the city. The model is validated using actual robbery incidences recorded for the city. Overall the model performs reasonably well with approximately 70% of future robbery incidences accurately identified within a small subset of the overall model. Developing countries such as South Africa are in dire need of crime risk intensity models that are simple, and not data intensive to allocate scarce crime prevention resources in a more optimal fashion. It is anticipated that this model is a first step in this regard.

The study of terrain and all its related elements and facets are of crucial importance to the military. Lodi, Smit, and Ayirebi agreed with this statement and added that the importance of terrain was recognised by military leaders more than two thousand years ago.[i] Military operations can occur at any of the three levels of war: tactical, operational and strategic and can be a combat operation or a military operation other than war (MOOTW). Information about the geography empowers a military commander to plan and execute a mission successfully. As technology developed and evolved, geographic information systems (GIS) have come to play a major role in this. Today, a military operation without the use of GIS is unthinkable. In a developing country like the South Africa, however, licenses for proprietary GIS software, vendor-exclusive training and the bureaucracy of the procurement cycle add to the time and costs of a mission. The question arises whether open source software is a feasible alternative. Since the South African National Defence Force was initially trained in the use of proprietary software and it therefore became a strong habit, the perception now exits that FOSSGIS products are neither mature enough nor user-friendly enough to be used in military operations. This study evaluates the use of an open source desktop GIS product, QGIS, in a use case for a military operation “other than war” (MOOTW). QGIS outputs were compared to those produced in ArcGIS, a proprietary desktop GIS product widely used in military operations. The user-friendliness of the two products as well as pricing was also compared. Results show that the QGIS outputs provide the operational commander with equivalent information to successfully plan and execute a mission. This implies that open source GIS is suitable for military operations, especially those with limited budgets and at short notice, such as in the case of disaster relief. [i] Lodi, K., Smit, H. & Ayirebi, G. (2014). Terrain analysis in the course curricula of the South African Army Engineer Corps. Scientia Militaria: South African Journal of Military Studies, 42, 102-121.

Abstract. Spatial data infrastructure No mapping agency can expect to capture and process entirely by itself, all the geospatial data needed for its products. The agency needs data sets from elsewhere and workflows and protocols for creating its various products. Unsurprisingly, such workflows and inter-institutional arrangements have evolved into broader collaborations, particularly as spatial data infrastructures (SDIs). An SDI is an evolving concept about facilitating and coordinating the exchange and sharing of geospatial data and services between stakeholders from different levels in the geospatial data community. The Commission on SDI & Standards (and its predecessors) of the International Cartographic Association (ICA) has developed formal models of an SDI, using the viewpoints of the Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP) and the Unified Modeling Language (UML) for the detailed modelling. The Commission described an SDI from the Enterprise Viewpoint (purpose, scope and policies for an SDI), Information Viewpoint (semantics of information and information processing in an SDI) and Computational Viewpoint (functional decomposition of the SDI into a set of services that interact through interfaces) (Hjelmager et al., 2008, Cooper et al., 2012). The ICA Commission did not investigate the Engineering and Technology Viewpoints of an SDI, because they are implementation-specific and the Commission has aimed at providing technology-independent models for an SDI. Other researchers have used the Engineering and Technology Viewpoints for specific SDIs.SDI stakeholdersThe Enterprise Viewpoint model (Hjelmager et al., 2008) included six types of stakeholders in an SDI: Policy Maker, Producer, Provider, Broker, Value-added Reseller and End User. Any one person, group, committee or organisation can have multiple stakeholder roles, which could be simultaneously. Each stakeholder can have an active or passive relationship with any activities or components in an SDI. A stakeholder in an SDI could also be considered to be an actor (Oliveira and Lisboa-Filho, 2015). Various trends are increasing the number of stakeholders in the SDI, their associated diversity and heterogeneity, and the resources at their disposal.Subsequently, the ICA Commission assessed whether or not these SDI models catered for volunteered geographical information (VGI), that is, user-generated geospatial content, or user-generated content with geospatial components. The models are sufficiently robust to do so, though it was then realised that the SDI stakeholders needed to be described in more detail as subtypes of the general roles of the six types of SDI stakeholders. The Commission then identified 24 subtypes for the stakeholders, with several of these subtypes having further sub-subtypes. For example, a Producer could have a subtype Status, which in turn could have the subtypes Official Mapping Agency or Commercial Mapping Agency (Cooper et al., 2011). However, a better term than subtype might be specialization, special case, attribute, activity or role. Collectively, these Enterprise, Information and Computational Viewpoints and the detailed stakeholders form what is known colloquially in the literature as the ICA model or ICA’s formal model of an SDI, such as by (Oliveira et al., 2016). The ICA SDI model is not meant to be a prescriptive model of an SDI, but rather a descriptive one. The ICA SDI model is also implementation-independent and hence somewhat abstract.Issues with the stakeholders While all the stakeholder subtypes in an SDI were given definitions, some of the types and subtypes were confused with one another by other researchers. Further, it became clear that not all stakeholders have benevolent relationships with SDIs, whether the stakeholders be malevolent, or just too idle or incompetent to help the SDI succeed. Hence, it is necessary to update the ICA SDI stakeholder model.We have reviewed the literature and several authors have proposed improvements to the ICA SDI stakeholder model and have highlighted parts of the model that are not well understood. Further, the ICA Commission itself has also revisited the model at previous meetings. The key contributions concerning the stakeholder model are summarised in this paper. They include: Making it clear that any contributor to an SDI should control their assets in the SDI and can withdraw them when they see fit. Catering explicitly for a contact or representative for any community. Including an educator role, and by extension, a researcher role. Including a role for those who fund the SDI itself and fund all of the relevant stakeholders so that they can function effectively. Catering for how stakeholders could be assembled together, such as in special-interest groups. Catering for oversight explicitly, such as through an ombud. Making it clear that a subtype of a stakeholder is not necessarily subordinate to that stakeholder. Characterising the maturity of a stakeholder. Including a subtype for public-sector producers that are not official mapping agencies. Whether or not agency, contracting or representation roles or functions should be deemed to be separate stakeholders in the model. Improving the End User, which has only two subtypes. Catering for shifts in the roles and characteristics of SDI stakeholders over time. Including service producers explicitly. Catering for representatives of the SDI who liaise with other organisations or other SDIs. Including explicitly some of the roles within the Secretariat, such as systems administration, technical support and quality assurance. Some attributes could be common across all or most of the six types of stakeholders in an SDI, such as their motivation for contributing to, or using, any particular SDI; their authority or ability to contribute; whether or not they are liable for their contributions and any consequences thereof; and the ethics related to the contribution, including invasion of privacy, arbitrary restrictions or mischief. The SDI stakeholder model needs to cater for both the top-down and the bottom-up approaches to an SDI. This paper proposes some revisions and expansions on this ICA model of the stakeholders in a spatial data infrastructure. While updating the model has not yet been completed, we believe that it will be appropriate to present our findings now to the ICA community to obtain feedback.

Abstract. Collaborative custodianship refers to an arrangement where a number of custodians work together to produce integrated datasets for a spatial data infrastructure (SDI), e.g. local authorities contributing address or street data to a national SDI dataset. Collaborative cloud mapping allows for ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand, configured and tailor-made mapping with resources shared between various entities collaborating on a specific initiative, such as an SDI or for disaster management. This paper presents the results of a workshop in South Africa during which case studies from the Netherlands, Belgium and Austria of collaborative custodianship of address data were presented, and OpenStreetMap as a case study of collaborative cloud mapping. Subsequently, challenges and opportunities for implementing similar initiatives in the context of the South African SDI were debated in break-away sessions. The results from these sessions were analysed using the PESTEL framework.