Cost savings are an important driver or motivation for sharing geospatial data and information. As costs associated with collecting and maintaining geospatial data are high, sharing data means that users no longer need to duplicate data gathering and archiving, which leads to savings in terms of personnel, space/facilities, data acquisition and maintenance costs. One fundamental argument for sharing thus derives from scale economies in production. Because the cost of making data is high, there is a clear incentive to maximize the number of users of these data. Sharing allows data to be used repeatedly for many purposes, thus increasing their value without increasing their cost. Sharing data also leads to improved data quality. Moreover, in many cases, sharing data is the only way to get access to certain data sets, as the authority to collect and manage certain data lies with another public institution.
In progress (GI-N2K)