One of the principles of an SDI is that the data contained within it is not managed centrally; it is managed by data owners or originators instead. Data owners or originators can be external third parties, but more likely they will be employees of your organization. These users will require the ability to connect to the SDI with a GIS tool to perform editing operations. Due to the nature of the editing that they will be doing, in most cases these users will use a Desktop GIS. Often, these types of users are known as power users.

There are many different Desktop GIS platforms available in the market, ranging from open source tools such as QGIS (http://www.qgis.org) through to proprietary tools such as Esri's ArcGIS for a desktop (http://www.esri.com). Each of these applications will have their own internal data types and will support a different range of formats to read and write spatial data. Where it is possible for you to standardize on a single...