Further, the expansion of the Internet and increasingly advanced network software ought to make information sharing especially feasible, convenient, and powerful. Yet it is rare to see environmental managers meaningfully sharing geographic information across organizational boundaries. These aspects sharply distinguish geographic information from traditional alphanumeric data. Data collection is through interviews and reviews of documents, digital datasets, and installed systems. The second goal is to determine how infrastructure choices have led to the impacts described, and how they address the difficulties encountered.
Timeliness measures the time required for access vs. the time constraints of the user's task.
Third, encapsulation defines whether users receive data in a usable form, or must interpret streams of bytes themselves. From the architect's viewpoint, reciprocal sharing lets participants both send and receive information. Flexibility to grow and change the sharing infrastructure is also important. Third, non-intrusiveness describes how little the sharing disrupts each organization's internal procedures. These criteria are used to characterize a sharing infrastructure and its relation to user impacts.