World Food Programme Spatial Data Infrastructure and the Global Change analysis

A complete understanding of the complexity of physical-ecological-anthropogenic systems is the objective for scientists that are faced with Global Change and its consequences; managing and modelling the dynamic interaction of natural and social systems is the key for a clearer understand of actual environmental processes and how they may evolve in the future. Modelling, data collection, knowledge discovery, and support for policy-making are thus the main topic to be developed. Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) is a new approach to creation, distribution and use of geographic information that tries to address the shortcomings listed above. SDI tries to avoid the old view of GIS as an automated map distribution system, which focuses on map production and distribution of existing sources on an “as-is” basis. SDI disseminates spatial data with associated quality control, metadata information, and semantic descriptions [15]. An SDI is finally a structured environment where to store and to perform complex analysis on geographically related data; studies in the field of climate change that need the collection of huge amount of historical and reference data, such as flood and drought monitoring, are ideally managed into an SDI structure.