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NSDI AND PARTNERSHIPS 5 1 NSDI and Partnerships GOALS OF THE NSDI Our nation must continually address a wide range of complex economic, social, and environmental issues. Geospatial information, together with related computer systems, is pivotal to helping communities, companies, and governments synthesize the information required to address these issues in a timely and efficient manner. However, many of these geospatial data are also difficult to locate, obtain, and integrateâin addition to representing a sizable financial investment by each user sector. 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 National Research Council (NRC, 1993; p. 16) initially described the NSDI as: âtheâ¦means to assemble geographic information that describes the arrangement and attributes of features and phenomena on the Earth. The infrastructure includes the materials, technology, and people necessary to acquire, process, store, and distribute such information to meet a wide variety of needs.â The importance of the NSDI subsequently was recognized at the federal level in the 1993 Reinventing Government report. The 1994 Executive Order 12906 supported implementation of the NSDI, and the task of providing leadership of the NSDI was assigned to the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC). The importance of the NSDI was
NSDI AND PARTNERSHIPS 6 reiterated in a 1998 report, Geographic Information for the 21st Century: Building a Strategy for the Nation (NAPA, 1998), in which the National Academy of Public Administration identified the NSDI as an important national priority for the United States. At the core of the NSDI is the concept of partnerships, or collaborations, among different agencies, corporations, institutions, and levels of government. Partnerships are designed to share the costs of creation and maintenance of geospatial data, in order 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. The concept of NSDI partnerships specifically does not refer to joint data ownership, but rather emphasizes the mutual advantages arising from collaboration between partners. Partnerships provide a mechanism for augmenting a system of centralized production of geospatial data, where one (usually national) agency has assumed all of the responsibility and cost, so that the data may be disseminated through a coordinated but diverse patchwork of arrangements that is more suited to meeting local needs. The concept was elaborated in a 1994 NRC report, Promoting the National Spatial Data Infrastructure through Partnerships (NRC, 1994), which suggests that given a network of partnerships and effective coordination among partners, the NSDI has enormous potential to minimize the redundant collection of spatial data, to increase citizen participation in decision making, to improve information available to support decision making at all levels of government and the private sector, and generally to sustain the economic well-being of the nation. Considerable progress has been made in the evolution of the NSDI in the seven years since 1994. For example, the Open GIS Consortium (OGC, 2001), a not-for-profit organization with more than 200 corporate, agency, and institutional members, has made much progress in overcoming the lack of interoperability between geospatial datasets and software systems. Of particular interest is the Web Mapping Testbed, which demonstrates that diverse datasets residing on distributed servers can be combined into a common view through a simple browser interface. Many partnerships have been formed, often at the instigation or with the financial support of federal programs. These partnerships have taken many different forms with many different sets of objectives. The NSDI continues to expand and to reach into new areas of application.
NSDI AND PARTNERSHIPS 7 Figure 1 summarizes the current level of involvement in NSDI throughout the nation, based on responses to a recent survey carried out by the National States Geographic Information Council (NSGIC) and the FGDC. Even though there has been considerable success, several questions remain concerning the original premise of the NSDI and the role of partnerships: ⢠What forms of partnership work best? ⢠How effective are partnerships at fostering each of the basic aims of the NSDI? ⢠How successful have the various partnership programs sponsored by the federal government been at achieving the objectives of the NSDI? FIGURE 1. Interest in the NSDI is widespread, a result in part of the partnership programs sponsored by the FGDC. This map illustrates how counties responded to a recent NSGIC/FGDC survey asking about active participation in NSDI framework development (Somers, 1999, page 9; reprinted with permission from Geospatial Solutions).
NSDI AND PARTNERSHIPS 8 In accordance with the committeeâs charge to provide external advice to federal agencies, this study is directed specifically to the third of these three questions (see Box 1). More precisely, it addresses the effectiveness of the FGDC partnership programs at meeting the four main goals of the NSDI: ⢠Reducing redundancy in geospatial data creation and maintenance. ⢠Reducing the costs of geospatial data creation and maintenance. ⢠Improving access to geospatial data. ⢠Improving the accuracy of geospatial data used by the broader community. If it can be demonstrated and publicized that partnerships are an effective mechanism for achieving these four goals, then the NSDI can be expected to continue to grow and flourish. The committee believes that success in each of these four areas is crucial for the long-term growth and viability of the NSDI. BOX 1 STATEMENT OF TASK The Mapping Science Committee will assess the success and potential of the various partnership programs for geospatial capabilities, and how these and future programs based on them contribute to the goals of the broader National Spatial Data Infrastructure. Specifically, the committee will assess the success of the partnership programs in: ⢠reducing redundancy in geospatial data creation and maintenance, ⢠reducing the costs of geospatial data creation and maintenance, ⢠improving access to geospatial data, ⢠improving the accuracy of geospatial data used by the broader community. The study will use the status quo in the absence of these programs as the baseline. The study will specifically avoid comment on any additional objectives of these programs that are outside the immediate domain of NSDI.