ABSTRACT
In today’s society citizens, businesses, and government use geographic information for many of their day-to-day decisions. Creating and capturing value from geographic data requires raw data to be turned into geographic information (GI) services and products that are consumed by end-users. Value will be further enhanced through the harmonization, publication, interlinking, curation, and exploitation of the data. Organizations can fulfill many different roles in the process of generating value from geographic data, and many different geographic information business models exist. The aim of this chapter is to contribute to the understanding of the diversity of business models of organizations dealing with geographic information. This is done by investigating how organizations use a broad variety of models to create, deliver, and capture value. Following an in depth literature review, this chapter discusses the geographic information value chain, including the different actors, the roles and value-adding processes within this chain. The business models for geographic information are then synthesized and analyzed. Looking at business implementation, three examples are provided, which focus on data providers, supply facilitator, and access facilitators.
