Evaluating the socio-economic impact of Geographic Information: A classification of the literature

Geographic information (GI) is increasingly important to citizens, businesses and governments in modern societies. Considerable effort has been devoted to understanding how GI affects the information management strategies and practices of individual organizations (GITA, 2006). However, there is an increasing awareness across public and private organizations that more attention has to be paid to assessing the broader economic and socio-economic impacts of GI applications (Craglia and Nowak, 2006). Given the investments that local, regional, national and supra-national organizations have made in GI and may consider for the future, it is imperative that the impacts of GI be assessed across all scales. This is particularly relevant as GI is viewed increasingly as an infrastructural element for which investments and benefits must be justified and quantified (Grus et al., 2007). Although an increasing number of researchers are examining different approaches to evaluating specific GI applications, it is clear that the documentation of business cases and assessment strategies for GI economic and socio-economic impacts is still incomplete (GITA, 2006). The key objective of this paper is to analyze and classify some of the current literature related to assessing the impact of GI. This review, which was conducted under the auspices of the EcoGeo II project (http://ecogeo.scg.ulaval.ca), is based on an examination of 32 academic, business and government studies. A classification framework was constructed to compare these studies with reference to two key variables: topics and approaches. The studies we analyzed were developed within different public and private organizations and spanned international, national and regional scales. The results show that assessing the economic and socio-economic impacts of GI remains largely embryonic in nature. In particular, we identify the need for a common vocabulary and understanding of which topics should be assessed, as well as testing of any proposed evaluation techniques.