Building National Spatial Data Infrastructures

Spatial Data Taxonomy

—Pamela Keller, USDI Bureau of Land Management

The Spatial Data Taxonomy (SDT) offers a way to improve spatial data management through a comprehensive framework for organizing and standardizing geospatial data. It provides a complete and concise picture of all unique geospatial data relevant to the world of natural resource management. It groups data according to intrinsic data qualities including their spatial characteristics. Data is placed into a hierarchy of high level categories, subcategories and individual themes in order to take advantage of inherited attributes and spatial design. Relationships between data are exposed so that they can be simplified and encapsulated. The SDT provides a home for new data so that the geospatial database can grow in an organized fashion. And an SDT geodatabase is inherently logical, simple, easy to understand and cheap to maintain.