ABSTRACT
In the context of sustainable development goals, this chapter argues for an ecosystem view of lifelong learning at the core of building and maintaining the brainware for geospatial information systems supporting our livelihoods. ‘Brainware’, the human capacity and competence to manage Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) and related geospatial information frameworks is widely considered a bottleneck in generating decision support for societies, economies and environments. Employing the concept of ‘ecosystem services’, the joint and collaborative contribution of stakeholders to geospatial capacity building is considered an essential service to SDI brainware development, which cannot be rendered by any individual institution alone. Academic education in geospatial technologies, methods and applications have parallel roots in several spatially oriented disciplines. Geography adopted quantitative methods and computer cartography as a pathway towards Geographical Information Systems. Curriculum development has to be a multi-stakeholder effort, shall reach beyond initial education cycles to cover lifelong learning perspectives, and primarily address fundamental concepts adaptable to technological evolution and updated methods.
