Estimating the costs of an SDI-based project

The development of any information system entails a set of costs that must be estimated well in advance. The estimation of costs facilitates an appropriate project planning and helps monitoring the different project tasks, verifying whether the expected cost of tasks is out of step with their real development. Given the multidisciplinary nature of Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI), the estimation of costs for SDI-based projects is particularly complex. Apart from the complexity of technical aspects, they usually require the coordination of resources coming from different institutions in the public and private arenas. In such complex scenarios, the task of estimating may benefit from the development of small prototypes that can help the large scale estimation. This work estimates the costs for the implementation of an SDI-based project (SDIGER) in the European context based on the background given by a first prototype.