Geographic Information Systems: An Introduction, 3rd Edition

1.2 Socioeconomic Challenges

Various surveys have been conducted to determine the importance of geographical data by assessing the proportion of all data that are geographical, as defined earlier. In local government bodies and in utility companies the proportion is often over 80%; in mapping agencies it may come very close to 100%. These surveys have also shown that major users of geographical data—the construction sector, public administration, agriculture, forestry and other resource management, telecommunications, electricity supply, transportation—spend 1.5% to 2% of their annual budgets in acquiring geographical data. In relation to gross national product (GNP), annual expenditures average 0.5% in industrialized countries and 0.1% in developing countries. In the United States, a 1993 survey by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) found annual expenditures on geographical information in federal agencies totaling more than $4 billion, suggesting that the total in all areas of U.S. society is well over $10 billion. The major challenges to system developers and users today are very different from those at the time of the OMB survey, and are related to the comparative ease of use of the technology, the problems of finding and accessing suitable data, and the lack of trained personnel able to exploit the technology's potential to its full.

Our complex society

Modern societies are now so complex, and their activities so interwoven, that no societal problem can be considered ...