Research Issues

• Fully investigate and develop incentives, in addition to economic incentives, for encouraging government parties, particularly at the local and state level, to make their spatial data sets available and accessible.
• Through comparative analysis of existing operations on spatially-indexed information, expose information policies and legal arrangements suited for encouraging widespread access to data sets and under what circumstances.
• Evaluate the effectiveness of the various incentives and recommend incentives and legal arrangements that will best encourage government jurisdictions, as well as the private sector, to make their data sets available through the technology being developed.