The Commission on Spatial Data Standards of the International Cartographic Association is working to define formal models and technical characteristics of Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI). To date, this work has been restricted to the Enterprise and Information Viewpoints from the ISO Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing standard. The Commission has developed models for these two viewpoints. These models describe how the different parts of an SDI fit together in the viewpoints in question. These models should be seen as a contribution towards the overall model of the SDI and its technical characteristics. During the model development process, the roles of the different Actors in an SDI in the Enterprise and Information Viewpoints have also been identified in Use Case diagrams of an SDI. All the models have been developed using the Unified Modeling Language.

Geospatial information and technologies are widely used in South Africa, initially mostly with proprietary software but today, mature, open source alternatives such as QGIS are available. We wanted to find out if and why South African users accepted QGIS, globally the most widely used free and open source GIS. We adapted the extended unified theory of acceptance and use of technology model to test several hypotheses regarding the acceptance and use of QGIS in South Africa. 205 registered members of the Geo‐Information Society of South Africa completed a structured questionnaire. Results show that habit has the most significant influence on behavioural intention to use QGIS, followed by facilitating conditions, price value and social influence. Performance expectancy, effort expectancy, hedonic motivation and access to source code played no significant role. The findings show that adoption of QGIS in South Africa is not primarily influenced by benefits attributed to open source software, such as cost benefits, customizability, improved reliability, quality and security. The results are useful for developers of any GIS product and for choosing a GIS product for an organization, because they provide insight into the behavioural intentions of users.

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