Geoinformation and its importance for Geographical Information Technologies.

Abstract

The Spatial Data Infraestructure (SDI) of the INSPIRE initiative (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe) and the standards of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) have considerably increased geospatial information on the Web. Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and Virtual Globes (VG) provide interfaces that allow the integration of geoinformation. There are also different types of online map viewers which allow us to retrieve  additional geoinformation from the net. All of these improvements in the collection of spatial information make it advisable to classify them into subjects, themes or geoportals. We start with the official statistical offices and then we deal with geoportals of official cartography offices as well as SDI portals with territorial information. We end with some reflections about the relevance of GI for GIT.