An assessment of the accessibility of spatial data from the Internet to facilitate further participation with geographical information systems for novice indigenous users in South Australia

Geographical Information Systems (GIS) are becoming more widespread, but there is still debate as to whether the use of GIS is a socially inclusive activity and, within this debate, the accessibility of spatial data is a pertinent issue. Governments around the world have developed Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) to facilitate the dissemination of spatial data and Australia, Canada and the United States are acknowledged leaders in this field. Such initiatives have the potential to bring new users, for example Indigenous people, to GIS but with this expansion there is a consequential demand for up-to-date and freely available spatial data. This paper evaluates the accessibility of spatial data from the Internet within Australia and contextualises performance with a comparison with Canada and the United States. The GIS industry has a variety of terms for data and this research uses the most popular of these to search the Internet for webpages containing spatial data. A traditional information retrieval technique (Precision) is used to analyse the webpages returned, and is supplemented with further analyses regarding webpage ranking and industry sector. The main findings indicate approximately 50% of retrieved webpages contained free data, but reveal that Australia performs worse than North America in comparison. The highest ranking websites are Canadian, and governments are the dominant spatial data providers. This research indicates that Australian data is not easily accessible and, if the public are to be more engaged, the delivery options should be reviewed.