This column is sponsored by ESRI
I think the answer to this question is different all over the world, and at varying levels of government. I’ll focus on the United States federal policy and governance of geospatial data and practice. It’s also important to define the meanings of policy and governance when addressing this question. A policy sets a vision and course of action, while governance deals with government management and controls.
At the U.S. federal level, I’d contend that there’s much more geospatial policy than there is governance. I say this because the U.S. market is an open one. Geospatial data that is collected at the federal level is provided free to U.S. citizens on the basis that their taxpayer dollars bought the data to begin with. There’s no need or call for much geospatial governance of the public or other levels of government, because the federal government has no need to protect anything.
Data Use and Availability
In the United States there aren’t heavy licensing fees and detailed guidelines for access and use of federal geospatial data, but there also isn’t this means of funding. Where data is sold and licensed, it’s necessary to add a level of bureaucracy, but this approach also comes with the burden of enforcement. Without the enforcement mandate here in the U.S., the federal government becomes much less of an overseer and more of an influencer of geospatial practice.
Some might see the limitation of enforcement authority as a serious challenge, because there’s very little leverage for the federal government to mandate action. This lack of direct oversight hasn’t caused much constraint on the geospatial market to date. In fact, the benefits of free data have outweighed any negative consequences of a government-owned and regulated geospatial marketplace.
Mandating Cooperation
One place that the federal government has great oversight and governance is within the federal branch, where there are increasing guidelines for geospatial data procurement by various agencies. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has oversight on how money is spent. The geospatial data procurement contracts of the federal government have long been a frustration of the OMB and individual states. Observers have witnessed repeated investments of imagery and other data for the same geography by different agencies, that haven’t involved input from individual states.
The redundant geospatial data investment was meant to be combated by the OMB Circular A-16 (“Coordination of Geographic Information and Related Spatial Data Activities). However, this document, and OMB’s lack of enforcement, have until recently made little impact on these redundancies. There is hope for change now with the creation of the Geospatial Line of Business, whose creation will “result in a more coordinated approach to producing, maintaining, and using geospatial data, and will ensure sustainable participation from Federal partners to establish a collaborative model for geospatial-related activities and investments.”
This piece of governance could have broad implications for the future of the geospatial industry. At issue is the lack of a high-quality, consistent and up-to-date nationwide data sets. At present, our federal government is woefully behind a lot of the world in terms of both accuracy and currency of our geospatial data. A centrally coordinated effort for data collection and management could help correct this deficiency.
Standards Adoption and Innovation
The federal government asserts much influence in the promotion and adoption of industry standards and practices. The investments of large government agencies serve to provide a catalyst for change, and to spur widespread adoption of standards and technologies.
The approach of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) has been a great influencer of geospatial standards adoption, particularly in the last seven years. NGA has exerted strong influence through its support of the Open Geospatial Consortium, and its establishment of the National Center for Geospatial Intelligence Standards (see Enabling a Common Vision [PDF]). NGA’s vision for a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) that enables the storage, retrieval, and sharing of vital GEOINT, will benefit all geospatial practitioners, as it’s spurring vendor investments in enterprise enablement.
The U.S. Census Bureau is another federal agency that has spurred innovation, back to its very early roots. The Census Burea was one of the first country-scale investors in a geospatial data set, and they’ve continued to innovate in how they collect and distribute data. The recent failure of handheld GPS units for data collection is a huge shame that may adversely affect the adoption of handheld data collection systems. Here their innovative approach was derailed by poor execution, and it is hoped that this one failure doesn’t stifle future innovation.
If I could pick one area where I’d like to see more federal leadership, it is in the creation of large-scale intelligent models. To date there have been investments in sensor technology and large-scale 2D models for predicting and forecasting, but no shared “Digital Earth” vision across government. NASA’s investment in the open-source World Wind shared three-dimensional world is an interesting start. But how far would this vision advance if there were suddenly a mandate for government scientists to adhere to a standard data format and post their data into a collaborative 3D digital world environment?
Read what Jeff Thurston has to say on this topic here.
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One of the big issues historically has been that geospatial data, investment and activities have not been vertical, but instead are incidental to program activities, and thus scattered horizontally throughout agencies. As such, it leads itself naturally to stovepipes and isolated development efforts.
As such, even improved funding alone would not solve the problem without additional drivers – and even OMB oversight at present doesn’t fully address it, as many program managers view their efforts not as geospatial, but as supporting whatever core business process, to which location may be an incidental component. On one hand, technologies such as KML are providing opportunities, and public demand is driving toward new directions in data sharing, but the federal mandates and guidance at present, while they have made some strides, are still not strong or compelling enough.
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