Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Geospatial One-Stop opens

From: "marcel_rf1" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 02 Jul 2003 13:51:19 -0000

Geospatial One-Stop opens
BY Diane Frank 
July 1, 2003 

The Office of Management and Budget and the Interior Department on 
June 30 launched the Geospatial One-Stop portal, the long-awaited 
first step toward consolidating vital geospatial data across federal, 
state and local agencies.

The portal (www.geodata.gov) is one of the 24 cross-agency 
e-government initiatives, and it is truly cross-governmental. Much of 
the detailed data-such as the location of sewer lines, hospitals and 
community centers-is collected and held by state and local 
governments.

Making all of that information easily available in one place where it 
can be combined, enhanced and separated is vital to government 
operations, officials said.

"Geospatial data is incredibly important to the business of 
government, especially state and local governments," said Mark Forman, 
administrator of OMB's Office of E-Government and Information 
Technology. "The information is used in so many ways, for so many 
purposes."

As governments face increasing fiscal pressures, the ability to rely 
on multiple sources for detailed information becomes both a service 
and cost advantage. For example, the data would help officials know 
exactly where and when to spray pesticides that prevent outbreaks of 
the West Nile virus, said Eric Conrad, deputy secretary of field 
operations for the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental 
Protection. "In times of tight budgets, this kind of information is 
essential," he said. 

At the federal level, the portal is also vital for other e-government 
initiatives, including the Disaster Management initiative and the 
Recreation.gov portal, Forman said. 

The portal's aim is to "make finding geospatial data easy and 
intuitive," said Hank Garie, executive director of the project at 
Interior.  As part of this, it moves one step beyond the "three clicks 
to service" goal for other initiatives, such as FirstGov, by trying to 
get to "two clicks to content."

"With one click of a mouse, it helps you put things into community 
context," Garie said.

The federal partners on the portal include NASA, the Environmental 
Protection Agency and the departments of Commerce and Defense. 
However, the state and local partners that make up the majority of the 
initiative's Intergovernmental Board of Directors, and the eight 
states that have already contributed their data to the portal are even 
more important.

"A lot of the real work on the Geospatial One-Stop is the result of 
the work of our nonfederal partners," said Scott Cameron, deputy 
assistant secretary for performance and management at Interior.

The portal is Phase One of the e-government initiative, Forman said. 
The next phase is to bring in more partners from the state and local 
levels to integrate their data and increase interoperability, Garie 
said. His goal is to have 25 more states involved by the end of the 
year. The portal was developed by ESRI, but complies with the 
interoperability and metadata standards developed by Open GIS 
Consortium Inc., of which ESRI is a member.

http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2003/0630/web-geo-07-01-03.asp

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