Full text: ISPRS Hangzhou 2005 Workshop Service and Application of Spatial Data Infrastructure

ISPRS Workshop on Service and Application of Spatial Data Infrastructure, XXXVI(4/W6), Oct.14-16, Hangzhou, China 
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THE US NATIONAL SPATIAL DATA INFRASTRUCTURE: 
WHAT IS NEW? 
Alan R. Steven 
Federal Geographic Data Committee, 590 National Center, USGS,Reston, Virginia, 20192, USA 
astevens@gsdi.org 
ABSTRACT 
Initially the US Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) and the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) major 
development focus has been almost completely at the federal level. With time and much promotion, FGDC's vision has found its 
way into states and local governments. The central focus of the NSDI is carried into the current political administration through the 
President's management agenda consisting of 25 major programs with a vision to improve the federal government's value to the 
citizen by an order of magnitude. The challenge is to make information, data and decisions available in minutes or hours, not weeks 
or months to other government agencies and the general public. This e-govemment (E-gov) is focused on using digital technologies 
to transform government operations in order to improve effectiveness, efficiency, and service delivery. Geospatial One-Stop (GOS) 
grew from this vision and raises the visibility of the strategic value of geographic information. It is another mechanism to accelerate 
the NSDI development in the US. Specifically it is to build framework data standards, breathe life into portal development, 
accelerate data inventory, and promote data and its application throughout the marketplace. Concurrently, the FGDC, the NSDI and 
GOS began to look strategically at the next steps in the evolution of the NSDI. International examples of infrastructure development 
have been examined and the strategy has been formulated with three principal goals: creating partnerships with purpose, making 
framework real, and communicating the message. The major message is that in order to create a truly national spatial data 
infrastructure, one needs to involve the people and data at the day-to-day working level - cities, counties, and utilities. New and 
different policies and partnerships need to be developed before all meaningful data can be made available for critical decision making. 
This massive effort involves components of the US Federal Government as well as State, County, City, and community Governments. 
The team also has considerable input from NGOs and the private sector. Early findings indicate that it is critical to build a formal 
national council involving all potential generators, users, and distributors in the public and private sectors. This plan is being 
reviewed at the current time and will yield a completely new approach to building the US NSDI. 
1. GEOGRAPHY IS THE COMMON LANGUAGE 
Cities, provinces, nations, and the world are largely built and 
can be described in layers. Beneath ground one finds the 
bedrock, soils, aquifers, sewers, subways, gas pipe lines, 
transmission lines, etc. On the surface we find streets and 
highways, land ownership, political boundaries, hydrography, 
water and waste treatment plants, hazardous dumps/pipelines, 
building footprints, farmland, forests, deserts, and a multitude 
of infrastructure that evolve over time. We also have several 
cultural layers of significance like demography, housing 
quality, poverty, pollution, etc. Above one might find the air 
quality, the atmosphere, and the planes that fly over. If a 
disaster disrupts any or all of these, it involves hundreds of 
federal, state, local and private groups with separate knowledge, 
jurisdiction and interest in these layers. No one group alone has 
all the data needed to do the job or to coordinate with others in 
performing critical tasks. Geography provides the common 
language and reference system for all response and recovery 
efforts. 
I am not here today to tell you that geographic information and 
geographic information systems (GIS) are the keys to disaster 
prevention and remediation. That fact is well established. A 
common framework is critical. Agreements among those that 
collect, process, archive, and distribute disparate geospatial 
information do so using common standards and interoperable 
systems and techniques...and share as much as possible via the 
web. It is essential that, when resource managers try to 
integrate these disparate data sets, for whatever reason, they fit 
together vertically and horizontally. 
Without a common framework there is no way to quickly tie 
together the essential information used to coordinate any 
unified response. A unified framework and base information 
have been and will continue to be critical to emergency 
managers and government officials responsible for response 
and recovery efforts regardless of the type of disaster. 
Imagine the confusion if the separate elements of information 
(roads/highways, sewer lines, water supply, gas lines, electrical 
transmission, building foot prints, land tenure, subways, toxic 
wastes, etc.) in a dense urban setting were available but in 
separate formats, collected via different standards, and with 
different reliability and at resolutions. 
2. SPATIAL DATA INFRASTRUCTURE (SDI) - WHAT 
IS IT? 
The single most important element to the success of any 
emergency response operation is the human contribution. 
Beyond that, standards for data quality and access become time 
critical. What are these critical ingredients to a successful 
emergency operation requiring geospatial data and information? 
They correspond to the components of a National Spatial Data 
Infrastructure (NSDI.) 
GEODATA - the actual geospatial data and information 
collected, processed, archived and potentially distributed by 
multiple agencies/organizations to meet disparate mission 
needs. It can be property ownership, political boundaries, land 
use/land cover, transmission lines, transportation/energy grids, 
geology, soils, surface and groundwater hydrology, 
demography, disease vectors, economic service areas, and 
many more.
	        
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