Assistant Secretary-General / Chief Information Technology Officer (CITO) Choi Soon-hong has extended his offer to UNGIWG to host a Center of Excellence (CoE) for UNSDI at the Office of Information and Communications Technology (OICT) of the United Nations Secretariat.
In January the UNGIWG Secretariat made a call to UNSDI Focal Points in the various UN organizations, to begin updating the Interim UNSDI Framework deliverables their organizations are coordinating in 2009-10. Currently the updated document of the Interim UNSDI Framework deliverables is being edited by Mr. Ülgen, Senior Adviser on Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI), Office of ASG/CITO, as to convert the document to a project proposal suitable for acquiring donor funding. We expect the proposal to be finalized and ready for donor submission shortly.
To create an SDI Center of Excellence within the OICT is a natural consequence of the fact that OICT is responsible for bringing together information technology with the information processing needs of the Organization. It is common practise in developing SDIs around the world to differentiate the development of infrastructural ICT tools from the generation of content, thus creating the opportunity for other UN organizations to solely focus on the thematic content.