abstract
Information technology is used in many application areas as a means to support environmental sustainability, among them the various Digital Earth projects. Many of these initiatives are quite te chnology intensive, requiring sophisticated special purpose software and hardware. Other projects rely heavily on complex coordination of contributions from a large number of organizations. The authors are of the opinion that technology for supporting global sustainability in it self should be sustainable, or in other words, capable of being kept in existence over a sufficiently long span of time. We present some cases of both sustainable and non-sustainable systems and propose a set of criteria for analyzing and classifying the sustainability of a given technological framework and it’s components. On this backdrop we present Project OneMap, which has been designed with longevity, accessibility, simplicity and other aspects of sustainable technology in mind. The main objective of this project is to provide free online access to a large, global map. The map will be incrementally build by seamlessly integrating a large number of independent and uncoordinated contributions of geodata. A sufficient level of quality and consistency is assured by applying a peer review process to all submissions. In many ways the project will be a grass root effort, thus orthogonal to many other more centralized mapping projects. We highlight some sustainable aspects of Project OneMap.
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