OGC’s
column for the February, 1997 issue of GIS World
Who Will Design, Fund and Build the NSDI?
by Lance McKee
Vice president, corporate communications
OpenGIS Consortium, Inc.
In a paper published in the September 1994 issue of the Association for
Computing Machinery journal StandardView, H. Gregory Smith and Diane
E. Mularz explained
the concept of a spatial information infrastructure architecture for
the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI). Smith later joined the
Defense
Mapping Agency, now the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, where he's
helping to design such an architecture for the Department of Defense
Geographic Information
Integrated Product Team (GIIPT).
Smith and Mularz wrote, "An architecture is based on the context of
the problem being addressed," and they noted how architects respond
to the different contexts of a hotel and a subway station. They went on to
say, "Similarly, the context for an information infrastructure includes
its intended users, its integration requirements with respect to other
infrastructures and systems, and interoperability standards that must
be adhered to for such
things as data exchange protocols. ... [The NSDI's context] ... includes
the people who will access and provide services [NSDI partners] ... related
infrastructures with which it must interoperate [computers, computer-aided
design systems, networks, legacy databases, car navigation systems, surveying
systems, etc.], and policies that establish boundaries within which the
technology must operate [governing data sharing, public access, privacy,
data security,
intellectual property, cost recovery, commerce in value-added data, data
standards, geoprocessing standards, etc.]."
The role of the OpenGIS Consortium (OGC) regarding NSDI is to promote
the interoperability of technologies that underpin the NSDI. Other participants
play other roles focused on NSDI organizational and policy components.
Here's how the roles work together.
The Technology
Who will design the technology architecture of the NSDI? Technical generalists
from local and state government professional associations, such as the
National States Geographic Information Councils, the National Association
of Counties
and the American Planning Association, and from the Federal Geographic
Data Committee (FGDC) and FGDC's federal member agencies could collaborate
to
design the technology architecture. The best place to do it would be
in subcommittees of the OGC Management Committee and working groups of
the
OGC Technical Committee,
aided by OGC's commercial, government and academic experts. OGC user
members such as the GIIPT, engaged in their own architecture projects,
would offer
suggestions and links to their community-specific architectures. OGC,
by providing this organizational structure and rich network of relationships,
gives user organizations a handle on rapidly evolving geospatial technologies
and the businesses that create and deliver these technologies.
The People and Policies
Who will design the people and policy parts of the NSDI? The same institutions
creating the technology architecture should draft the people and policy
architecture, based on their understanding of how the new technical capabilities
can best
serve their constituencies. Imagine naively introducing today's information
technologies into an organization devoid of digital data, computers and
networks. You would first apply technology to meet the immediate needs
of the organization,
but soon you would see that the organization, given the new capabilities
and realities, would need to refashion itself with the technology to
optimize the organization's ability to fulfill its mission. The act of
architecture
(whether of buildings or information systems) is the act of anticipating
and designing around scores of relationships among human and nonhuman
elements to benefit humans and Earth ecosystems.
The Funds
Who will fund the NSDI? FGDC's member federal agencies can fund their
own spatial data infrastructures and help fund the NSDI architecture,
and the
states can fund state projects. But tens of thousands of local data producers
are the key players, and they are badly underfunded, piecing together
patchwork municipal spatial data infrastructures-a little from this budget,
a little
from that budget. Bruce Cahan, Urban Logic Inc., New York, offers a solution:
Local governments need at least one major capital financing program that
will finance comprehensive public and private local spatial data infrastructure
development projects. Cahan believes that metadata standards and OpenGIS
interoperability standards could be translated into underwriting criteria
suitable for treating spatial data as capital assets. If local governments
and their lenders can be made to see the waste and limitations of the
piecemeal approach, as well as the savings and benefits of an integrated
local spatial
data infrastructure, the NSDI could be funded and built in five years.
The Builders
Who will build the NSDI once it's designed and funded? Private-sector
product vendors and integrators serving public and private sector customers
will
build the technology parts of the NSDI, using the OpenGIS Specification
to ensure interoperability among the parts. The people and policy parts
of the
NSDI will be built by hundreds of established agencies and ad hoc teams
who will negotiate the metadata standards necessary for data sharing,
address new opportunities and problems raised by the new technologies,
develop
and
promulgate models that elaborate parts of the architecture, provide feedback
to revise the architecture and revise their operations to take advantage
of distributed geoprocessing.
###