5.2.4. Accessibility

The full value of a common geo-registry is expressed once its content is accessible to the largest number of users possible.

That said, it is possible that not all content can be made publicly accessible, at least not in the first instance, i.e., appropriate government approvals might be required, a certain level of quality needs to be reached, and/or the necessary policy and legal framework would need to be in place.

GeoPrism Registry currently provides two levels of access (referred to as visibility in the platform) for the Geo-Object Types, lists and spatial data it contains :

• Public: the item is accessible to any user from within the platform and to external users through an API

• Private: the item is only accessible to the organization having the curation mandate over it

Having these levels of accessibility for the content allows the platform to respect the current accessibility policy that each organization might want to apply to the content they are hosting in the platform while still benefiting from the functionalities it provides, but also to change such a level as the data sharing policy associated with this content evolves.

In the future, GeoPrism Registry is meant to add other levels of access (restricted to given organizations, for example), to apply these levels to hierarchies and to implement the rules from section 2.7.4 of Ebener (2022).