An important issue in research on spatial science is the development and uses of a suitable framework for implementation, assessment and continuous improvement of Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI). Due to the development of a National SDI in Iran, the need to justify the used resourced and to verify the efficiency of the implemented NSDI are felt. Creating SDI at global, regional, national, state, local and organizational level is a challenging issue for sustainable development of states. SDI assessment can be used to check whether the results of implementing SDI are effective; it can also increase common knowledge of SDI to improve future performances.

The main objective of this study is to evaluate the Iranian SDI from different views. This research seeks to answer the question of how to evaluate the performance of an SDI at national level. The detection of strengths and weaknesses of the implemented SDI is another objective of this paper.

For this purpose, various models for performance assessment were studied, and an appropriate one is selected. The selected model were modified to match the NSDI criteria. In this research, the Balanced ScoreCard (BSC) was selected for NSDI assessment. BSC assesses the performance from different perspectives, including financial, customer, internal processes and learning and growth perspectives. In order to fulfill the requirements, different views were considered. The most important points for an NSDI assessment include the financial metrics, strategies used, available technologies, users, employees, management, human resources, and the policy practiced. Through adoption of these criteria to the BSC perspectives, an appropriate method for NSDI performance assessment is proposed. Stability of an SDI assessment framework from different points of views is based on multiplicity of assessment views. The benefit of this method is the flexibility of the framework that permits to increase new perspectives of assessment and the adjustment and removal of the ones that exist. The evaluating of the Iranian NSDI using BSC model was performed for the first time in the country.

 In order to achieve the objectives of the study, various steps were taken. First, different views were considered. A questionnaire containing 62 questions with 5 options were prepared to include all aspects of NSDI assessment. After determining the sample size with visiting the centers and organizations in the field of Geomatics, the questionnaires were completed by experts in this field. The reliability test was done to ensure whether the questionnaire is able to assess the NSDI. Then, the weight for each question was calculated. Following, each questionnaire was weighted based on: the degree and the field of study; the work experience in the field of Geomatics, the organization of the person who filled the questionnaire and the correlation between answers for each person who responded. Then weights are normalized. After adopting the SDI assessment criteria with BSC method, criteria, sub-criteria and weights for each sub-criteria were estimated.

The final results of each of the four perspectives of BSC model showed that financial perspective has a 34.56%, the customer perspective has a 41.08%, the internal processes has a 49.67% and learning and growth perspective has a 39.75% performance ratio. The results showed that the current situation of NSDI in Iran is not satisfactory. To improve this condition, more efforts are needed in all perspectives. Most of the weaknesses were seen in the financial field; while in the field of internal processes performance was better in comparison to others. Regarding all four perspectives, performance value of NSDI in Iran was estimated as 41.27% which is lower than the average yield. Therefore; despite of the efforts of managers and experts in the field of Geospatial Information System (GIS) and SDI, the results indicating a lack of satisfactory performance.

Results of the assessment obtained from BSC model presented an overview of the current situation of the NSDI in Iran. In addition to seeing the results of each criterion, future researches can be conducted to examine more details of each criterion.  To this end, the situation of related sub-criteria can be studied for assessing the strengths and weaknesses of NSDI. Other researchers can add more criteria and sub-criteria. The main reason for the lack of satisfaction in results can be assigned to the restriction in releasing of national geoportal.  It should be noted that the results depend on the definition of sub-criteria and and their weights