National Academies Press: OpenBook
« Previous: ROLES OF PRIVATE INDUSTRY AND NON-PROFIT ORGANIZATIONS
Suggested Citation:"5 Conclusions and Recommendations ." National Research Council. 2001. National Spatial Data Infrastructure Partnership Programs: Rethinking the Focus. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10241.
×
Page 73
Suggested Citation:"5 Conclusions and Recommendations ." National Research Council. 2001. National Spatial Data Infrastructure Partnership Programs: Rethinking the Focus. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10241.
×
Page 74
Suggested Citation:"5 Conclusions and Recommendations ." National Research Council. 2001. National Spatial Data Infrastructure Partnership Programs: Rethinking the Focus. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10241.
×
Page 75
Suggested Citation:"5 Conclusions and Recommendations ." National Research Council. 2001. National Spatial Data Infrastructure Partnership Programs: Rethinking the Focus. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10241.
×
Page 76

Below is the uncorrected machine-read text of this chapter, intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text of each book. Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.

CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS 73 5 Conclusions and Recommendations Over the past seven years, the programs of the Federal Geographic Data Committee have been very successful in several respects. They have promoted the concepts and objectives of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure, and helped to ensure that the NSDI is a familiar acronym among government agencies at all levels, in academic environment, and among the private sector. They have initiated the National Geospatial Data Clearinghouse, and recruited a substantial number of servers to its transparent network. They have also promulgated standards, including 16 that have been endorsed by the community. These include the Content Standards for Digital Geospatial Metadata, a major contribution to the FGDC’s effort to promote greater sharing of geospatial data and less redundancy in its production. The various partnership programs analyzed in this report have contributed significantly to this effort. All states except North Dakota have received funding from at least one program, and a large number of partnerships have been initiated during the process of competing for these awards, and sustained by the federal funding. We conclude that the programs have succeeded in their role of launching the NSDI, and spreading awareness of it throughout the geospatial data community. The various programs have also played a significant role in seeding NSDI activities in smaller states, smaller agencies, and organizations with minimal resources. In this respect they have helped to “level the playing field,” and to ensure that the benefits of the NSDI are available to all. However, it is the view of the committee

CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS 74 that small-scale efforts designed to attract attention to the NSDI need to give way to larger-scale production efforts. Some research indicates that fewer than half of the local government entities in the United States are even aware of the meaning of NSDI. This suggests that there is a great deal of work remains to be done. The FGDC should be encouraged to get the word out through as many venues as possible and provide clear examples of how to participate and the benefits that can be gained. This study evaluated the partnership programs against four goals. One of these, improving access to geospatial data, has been greatly aided by the development of the Internet and World Wide Web, and the FGDC was quick to exploit the advantages of these technologies in the development of the National Geospatial Data Clearinghouse. We conclude that the programs have been very successful in achieving this third goal. However, with respect to the other goals of the specific FGDC partnership programs, we find little evidence that these programs have reduced redundancy in geospatial data creation and maintenance, reduced the costs of geospatial data creation and maintenance, or improved the accuracy of the geospatial data used by the broader community. For all three goals, little evidence has been found to demonstrate conclusively that the concept of the NSDI and its furtherance through partnerships has had any dramatic impact on overcoming the significant institutional barriers that inhibit the development and maintenance of spatial data. Without such evidence, we fear that the momentum established as a result of the missionary efforts during these seven years will dissipate, and that the NSDI will fail to achieve its promise. In our investigations, we looked for ways of assessing the impacts of the partnership programs using objective indicators and metrics. We found indicators of the level of interest in the NSDI at the state level, as discussed in Chapter 3. But we found a lack of procedures in the FGDC for long-term monitoring of the progress of NSDI. Such procedures would be of great value in assessing whether the NSDI program succeeds in moving beyond the missionary phase, and in arguing for future funding allocations. Accordingly, the committee recommends that the FGDC develop metrics that can be used to monitor long-term progress in the adoption of the principles and programs of the NSDI among agencies at all levels of govern

CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS 75 ment, academia, and the private sector. The Committee advocates adoption of a funding formula that provides resources to all participants on a non-competitive basis, coupled with grants of sufficient size and duration to achieve expected outcomes. In addition, the committee recommends that funding should be directed at projects that are of a sufficient scale to provide well-designed empirical tests of the hypotheses underlying the NSDI goals, and should allow for adequate documentation and dissemination of results. In our discussions, we were struck by the many forms of partnership that have emerged over the past seven years. Partnerships exist at all levels of government, and involve all types of organizations and agencies. Only a small proportion of them have received substantial funding from the FGDC programs, and in those cases the amount of funding provided was comparatively small relative to the total resources available to the partnership. It is difficult to see the complete picture if one focuses too much on the FGDC’s programs, and difficult to set these in the correct context. The Committee recommends that future partnership programs initiated by the FGDC should be conceived in the context of all relevant partnership programs, and should be designed to augment and leverage them to achieve maximum impact. The NSDI is at a critical juncture in its evolution. The FGDC continues to play the lead role of federal coordination. The efforts of the working groups and subcommittees have resulted in important dialog among the stakeholders and standards for the definition of different data components are emerging. At the same time, a new organization such as the GeoData Alliance could radically change the institutional setting for the promotion of the NSDI. The new initiative by the OMB demonstrates the importance of spatial data and recognizes that the Federal government has a limited role in its actual maintenance. We find it encouraging and surprising that the OMB initiative has been rapidly adopted as a useful umbrella for coordinating data sharing efforts at a variety of regional levels. The activities of these I-Teams must be carefully analyzed to determine whether a “bottom-up” model can be successful. We are also at an interesting stage in technological development that is driving a robust private sector. Commercial remote sensing satellites are providing data that are suitable for extraction of some urban features (e.g.,

CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS 76 LIDAR (LIght Detection And Ranging), IKONOS, and SPOT data, coupled with GPS, are providing enormous improvements in the capture of digital terrain data. The wealthier local governments are making substantial investments in spatial data to support more responsive and accountable form of services to the taxpayer. Commercial demand for street centerlines and postal code data is accelerating at the same time the Bureau of Census is releasing the 2000 census data and is contemplating the need for modernization of its TIGER database. All of these factors reinforce the Committee’s original view of a national need for a robust NSDI that is in the public domain. The Committee also appreciates that a successful NSDI must address the need for business plans that encourage private sector involvement and local government investments.

Next: References »
National Spatial Data Infrastructure Partnership Programs: Rethinking the Focus Get This Book
×
Buy Paperback | $47.00 Buy Ebook | $37.99
MyNAP members save 10% online.
Login or Register to save!
Download Free PDF

The National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) was envisioned as a way of enhancing the accessibility, communication, and use of geospatial data to support a wide variety of decisions at all levels of society. The goals of the NSDI are to reduce redundancy in geospatial data creation and maintenance, reduce the costs of geospatial data creation and maintenance, improve access to geospatial data, and improve the accuracy of geospatial data used by the broader community. At the core of the NSDI is the concept of partnerships, or collaborations, between different agencies, corporations, institutions, and levels of government. In a previous report, the Mapping Science Committee (MSC) defined a partnership as "...a joint activity of federal and state agencies, involving one or more agencies as joint principals focusing on geographic information." The concept of partnerships was built on the foundation of shared responsibilities, shared costs, shared benefits, and shared control. Partnerships are designed to share the costs of creation and maintenance of geospatial data, seeking to avoid unnecessary duplication, and to make it possible for data collected by one agency at a high level of spatial detail to be used by another agency in more generalized form.

Over the past seven years, a series of funding programs administered by the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) has stimulated the creation of such partnerships, and thereby promoted the objectives of the NSDI, by raising awareness of the need for a coordinated national approach to geospatial data creation, maintenance, and use. They include the NSDI Cooperative Agreements Program, the Framework Demonstration Projects Program, the Community Demonstration Projects, and the Community-Federal Information Partnerships proposal. This report assesses the success of the FGDC partnership programs that have been established between the federal government and state and local government, industry, and academic communities in promoting the objectives of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure.

  1. ×

    Welcome to OpenBook!

    You're looking at OpenBook, NAP.edu's online reading room since 1999. Based on feedback from you, our users, we've made some improvements that make it easier than ever to read thousands of publications on our website.

    Do you want to take a quick tour of the OpenBook's features?

    No Thanks Take a Tour »
  2. ×

    Show this book's table of contents, where you can jump to any chapter by name.

    « Back Next »
  3. ×

    ...or use these buttons to go back to the previous chapter or skip to the next one.

    « Back Next »
  4. ×

    Jump up to the previous page or down to the next one. Also, you can type in a page number and press Enter to go directly to that page in the book.

    « Back Next »
  5. ×

    To search the entire text of this book, type in your search term here and press Enter.

    « Back Next »
  6. ×

    Share a link to this book page on your preferred social network or via email.

    « Back Next »
  7. ×

    View our suggested citation for this chapter.

    « Back Next »
  8. ×

    Ready to take your reading offline? Click here to buy this book in print or download it as a free PDF, if available.

    « Back Next »
Stay Connected!