Information exchange had always been the major catalyst for improving and sharing research findings and use of applications in development. Low information exchange, in the midst of a suffocating melee of data, has been identified on several occasions as the immediate cause of low research activities, especially in recent times, and is a direct reflection of the poor sate of information exchange. As Nigeria , the giant of Africa , moves into the first two decades of the millennium with expected increase in space science-based activities and interventions, this problem of information exchange for research and other applications is bound to rise naturally. A lot of data are likely to be generated through earth-based and satellite-based sensors over large spatial grids. Such would include data on earth system, resources and environment; natural and man-made disasters; health-care, impact of certain anthropogenic activities on the atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, etc. (including air and water pollution; climate change, ozone layer depletion; threatened species; water and air quality). These data need to be stored, processed, retrieved and shared by all existing research and training centers that may require such data for scientific planning, policy reforms and/or implementing development visions.
It is gratifying to note that the matured outlook with which the Cooperative Information Network (COPINE) has so far delivered on existing promises to improve the development landscape came out of long, painful years of hard lessons on excruciating poverty, known as missed opportunities for development. The common adage, “opportunity, once lost, can never be regained”, puts a major thrust to the speed with which poverty must be reversed before more corruption, and then mismanagement takes over to multiply it. Right from its inception, COPINE has been improving the existing state of information exchange by linking knowledge institutions to development landscapes for sustainable future public networks and corresponding revenues to their users and operators. When fully developed, COPINE is envisaged to be a satellite-based information exchange network, with interactive infrastructural capability for linking urban and rural centers and selected service points including hospitals, universities, institutions with special documentations and libraries. COPINE will therefore strengthen peaceful use of space science and collaboration between and among local and international stakeholders in development by facilitating the acquisition of technical know-how and technology in a number of priority tele-application-oriented networks such as health-care (through tele-medicine), exchange of research information (including databases), management of natural resources and the environment, education (through tele-education).
The establishment of standards for implementing development visions, policy reforms and databases is long overdue because COPINE aims at achieving synergy that is borne out of a freedom of choice exhibited by development shareholders. This is because users of COPINE require the accurate transformation of databases, precise creation of models and effective recreation of policies to keep pace with growing prospects for installing optimal infrastructure and users’ needs coordinates. Subsequently, COPINE proposes to activate the scientific planning, development vision and policy reform initiatives with a view to building information exchange standards to address peculiar development issues.
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