The National States Geographic Information Council just released a detailed 32-page whitepaper with recommendations for a coordinated National Spatial Data Infrastructure. The whitepaper provides a vision of coordinated, but separate, statewide spatial data infrastructures. The idea is to enhance state initiatives with strong federal oversight and assistance as well as performance measures.
Among the recommendations is a National Geospatial Coordinating Council that would coordinate federal funds, establish consistent policies, guidelines and standards, and hold states accountable. The “For the Nation” initiatives are a key component of the NSGIC plan to accelerate uniform national framework data sets. The plan suggest that this start with Imagery for the Nation, followed by Elevation, Transportation and Cadastral.
The document also tackles national technology strategy and the need to coordinate a standard approach. The recommendation is for a shared system design and a common geospatial data model, along with data management workflows and shared services and service-oriented architecture. A significant segment of this section deals with the integration of heterogeneous data.
It’s clear that this document condenses years of collaborative effort for more efficient and effective spatial data policy. NSGIC has long been in the lead of a coordinated and reasoned approach to SDI implementation. It would seem that the time is right for an elevation of these efforts.
Recent industry discussions have offered some competing thoughts for a National GIS and the role of GIS for tracking the recovery effort. Most of the dialogue has come from vendors, so it’s nice to see a neutral organization put forth a thoughtful framework that outlines key steps to solve the long-standing problem of a coordinated and consistent national geospatial data framework.
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A useful approach would be for NSGIC to start promoting a lot more shared development on free and open, “Community Owned and Operated” interoperability software and schema development. Building up an ecosystem of Federally and State funded open software tools and community governed data exchange schema would enable all public sector data producing entities, especially the Local Govs who have the most detailed spatial data and (in most cases) tiny budgets, to participate more fully in a national data sharing effort. Strong advocacy on the part of NSGIC for a modern, open, and portable spatially enabled database format, as discussed in the Shapefile 2.0 Manifesto and other related articles and blog posts, would be appreciated.
NSGIC could stand to take a lesson from the Environmental Council of Sates (ECOS) in the matter of data sharing partnerships. A nation-wide partnership to enable the sharing of environmental data from many different local schema up to community governed national schema (via transformational web services) has already been in operation for some time. All 50 States, a collection of Tribes, and several Territories and NGOs currrently participate with ECOS and EPA in the National Environmental Information Exchange Network (Exchange Network, or EN as it is commonly known). NSGIC somehow neglected to mention this mature example of a multi-organizational, service oriented, national data sharing framework in their whitepaper. It is a partnership model that has proven to work, and the States do feel like true partners with the Feds and receive value from participating.
The EN provides a demonstrated set of data transport and transformation tools, as well as a new and improved discovery service that could (and should) be leveraged much more widely. It has been demonstrated through several State projects that spatial data in the form of GML or GeoRSS GML data can easily flow over the Network, and can be integrated with OGC services. In fact, the latest version of the national Facility Registry System schema is spatially enabled using GeoRSS GML. Federal OMB also recently validated the utility of the EN by selecting it as a web services platform for States to use in their Recovery.gov stimulus funding reporting. A project to transform parcel and land use data from the County level up to a State level “Community schema” and make it available via an EN web service will be starting soon. Open tools developed as part of this project will be freely available for re-use with other spatial data layers of potential interest.
For the near future, funding resources for the public sector geospatial communities will continue to be impacted due to the budget crisis. There is a lot sense in leveraging open data sharing technology that already exists. A good example of “Community Owned and Operated” interoperability software is the new OpenNode2 platform. It was commissioned by ECOS and a group of partnering states funded under a federal grant, and is freely usable by all. It can be found here:
OpenNode2
We must ensure that our spatial data remains easily accessible via open standards and interfaces, and in community governed, open and vendor-neutral formats. Using transformational web services would create an web service access layer, while allowing for existing in-house investments in commercial software to remain in place. Leveraging EN data transformation web services, in concert with existing OGC standards and emerging GeoWeb protocols is one way to achieve a more successful and open SDI. An NSDI 2.0, if you will.
This approach will take a little more effort on our parts than if everyone just bought into the same proprietary commercial software stack (trap) so that they can all use the same proprietary “geodatabase” model to share data. A positive result of the extra effort will be that our data remains truly open and accessible, and will safeguard the public’s return on their investment (e.g.the tax dollars used to create and maintain the data). Check out the ROI study the Network commissioned.
Exchange Network ROI Study
Thanks for this thorough and well-referenced reply. You bring up many excellent points, and I hope you’ve opened people’s eyes to some good collaborative data sharing examples. I like the NSDI 2.0 moniker, and will endeavor to explore that idea more in future posts.
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