[House Hearing, 108 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
GEOSPATIAL INFORMATION: ARE WE HEADED IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION, OR ARE WE
LOST?
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
SUBCOMMITTEE ON TECHNOLOGY, INFORMATION
POLICY, INTERGOVERNMENTAL RELATIONS AND
THE CENSUS
of the
COMMITTEE ON
GOVERNMENT REFORM
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED EIGHTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
JUNE 23, 2004
__________
Serial No. 108-239
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Government Reform
Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.gpo.gov/congress/house
http://www.house.gov/reform
______
U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
97-132 WASHINGTON : 2004
____________________________________________________________________________
For Sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office
Internet: bookstore.gpo.gov Phone: toll free (866) 512-1800; (202) 512�091800
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COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT REFORM
TOM DAVIS, Virginia, Chairman
DAN BURTON, Indiana HENRY A. WAXMAN, California
CHRISTOPHER SHAYS, Connecticut TOM LANTOS, California
ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida MAJOR R. OWENS, New York
JOHN M. McHUGH, New York EDOLPHUS TOWNS, New York
JOHN L. MICA, Florida PAUL E. KANJORSKI, Pennsylvania
MARK E. SOUDER, Indiana CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York
STEVEN C. LaTOURETTE, Ohio ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland
DOUG OSE, California DENNIS J. KUCINICH, Ohio
RON LEWIS, Kentucky DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois
JO ANN DAVIS, Virginia JOHN F. TIERNEY, Massachusetts
TODD RUSSELL PLATTS, Pennsylvania WM. LACY CLAY, Missouri
CHRIS CANNON, Utah DIANE E. WATSON, California
ADAM H. PUTNAM, Florida STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts
EDWARD L. SCHROCK, Virginia CHRIS VAN HOLLEN, Maryland
JOHN J. DUNCAN, Jr., Tennessee LINDA T. SANCHEZ, California
NATHAN DEAL, Georgia C.A. ``DUTCH'' RUPPERSBERGER,
CANDICE S. MILLER, Michigan Maryland
TIM MURPHY, Pennsylvania ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, District of
MICHAEL R. TURNER, Ohio Columbia
JOHN R. CARTER, Texas JIM COOPER, Tennessee
MARSHA BLACKBURN, Tennessee BETTY McCOLLUM, Minnesota
PATRICK J. TIBERI, Ohio ------
KATHERINE HARRIS, Florida BERNARD SANDERS, Vermont
(Independent)
Melissa Wojciak, Staff Director
David Marin, Deputy Staff Director/Communications Director
Rob Borden, Parliamentarian
Teresa Austin, Chief Clerk
Phil Barnett, Minority Chief of Staff/Chief Counsel
Subcommittee on Technology, Information Policy, Intergovernmental
Relations and the Census
ADAM H. PUTNAM, Florida, Chairman
CANDICE S. MILLER, Michigan WM. LACY CLAY, Missouri
DOUG OSE, California STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts
TIM MURPHY, Pennsylvania ------ ------
MICHAEL R. TURNER, Ohio
Ex Officio
TOM DAVIS, Virginia HENRY A. WAXMAN, California
Bob Dix, Staff Director
Dan Daly, Professional Staff Member
Juliana French, Clerk
Adam Bordes, Minority Professional Staff Member
C O N T E N T S
----------
Page
Hearing held on June 23, 2004.................................... 1
Statement of:
Evans, Karen S., Administrator of E-Government and
Information Technology, Office of Management and Budget;
Linda D. Koontz, Director, Information Management, U.S.
General Accounting Office; Scott J. Cameron, Deputy
Assistant Secretary for Performance and Management, U.S.
Department of the Interior; and William Allder, Jr.,
Director, Office of Strategic Transformation, National
Geospatial-Intelligence Agency............................. 10
Nagy, Zsolt, president-elect, National States Geographic
Information Council [NSGIC], geographic information
coordinator, North Carolina Department of Environment and
Natural Resources; Frederic W. Corle II, president, Spatial
Technologies Industry Association; John M. Palatiello,
executive director, Management Association for Private
Photogrammetric Surveyors; David Schell, president & CEO of
the Open GIS Consortium, executive director, Open GIS
Project; and Dr. David J. Cowen, chair, Mapping Science
Committee, National Research Council, chair, Department of
Geography, University of South Carolina.................... 74
Letters, statements, etc., submitted for the record by:
Allder, William, Jr., Director, Office of Strategic
Transformation, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency,
prepared statement of...................................... 55
Cameron, Scott J., Deputy Assistant Secretary for Performance
and Management, U.S. Department of the Interior, prepared
statement of............................................... 42
Clay, Hon. Wm. Lacy, a Representative in Congress from the
State of Missouri, prepared statement of................... 8
Corle, Frederic W., II, president, Spatial Technologies
Industry Association, prepared statement of................ 82
Cowen, Dr. David J., chair, Mapping Science Committee,
National Research Council, chair, Department of Geography,
University of South Carolina, prepared statement of........ 110
Evans, Karen S., Administrator of E-Government and
Information Technology, Office of Management and Budget,
prepared statement of...................................... 13
Koontz, Linda D., Director, Information Management, U.S.
General Accounting Office, prepared statement of........... 19
Nagy, Zsolt, president-elect, National States Geographic
Information Council [NSGIC], geographic information
coordinator, North Carolina Department of Environment and
Natural Resources, prepared statement of................... 76
Palatiello, John M., executive director, Management
Association for Private Photogrammetric Surveyors, prepared
statement of............................................... 96
Putnam, Hon. Adam H., a Representative in Congress from the
State of Florida, prepared statement of.................... 4
Schell, David, president & CEO of the Open GIS Consortium,
executive director, Open GIS Project, prepared statement of 102
GEOSPATIAL INFORMATION: ARE WE HEADED IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION, OR ARE WE
LOST?
----------
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 23, 2004
House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on Technology, Information Policy,
Intergovernmental Relations and the Census,
Committee on Government Reform,
Washington, DC.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 2:07 p.m., in
room 2154, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Adam Putnam
(chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.
Present: Representatives Putnam and Clay.
Staff present: Bob Dix, staff director; John Hambel, senior
counsel; Dan Daly, professional staff/deputy counsel; Shannon
Weinberg, professional staff/deputy counsel; Juliana French,
clerk; Colin Samples and Kaitlyn Jahrling, interns; Adam Bordes
and Mark Stephenson, minority professional staff members; and
Jean Gosa, minority assistant clerk.
Mr. Putnam. A quorum being present, this hearing of the
Subcommittee on Technology, Information Policy,
Intergovernmental Relations and the Census will come to order.
Good afternoon and welcome to the subcommittee's hearing
entitled, ``Geospatial Information: Are We Headed in the Right
Direction, Or Are We Lost?'' This oversight hearing is a
followup to the hearing held on June 10, 2003, entitled,
``Geospatial Information: A Progress Report on Improving Our
Nation's Map-Related Data Infrastructure.''
The purpose of today's hearing is to examine the progress
made by the Federal Government since last year's hearing to
consolidate and improve the utilization of the masses of
geospatial data collected by departments and agencies across
the Government and by State and local governments. This hearing
focused on Government and industry efforts to develop standards
for the collection and use of geospatial information to
facilitate data sharing. In most cases, information is
collected in different formats and standards designed for one
specific mission, with inadequate consideration given to
subsequent possible intergovernmental data sharing. This
results in wasteful redundancies and a reduced ability to
perform critical governmental operations.
The hearing will also focus attention on the Geospatial
Information One-Stop Initiative, one of the President's key E-
Government reforms intended to simplify the process of
locating, accessing, sharing, and integrating geospatial data
in a timely manner. Furthermore, during this hearing we will
evaluate the role that the private sector plays in arriving at
cost efficiencies and improving geospatial data quality for end
users.
This hearing is a continuation of the series of oversight
hearings conducted by this subcommittee during the 108th
Congress to keep Federal Government agencies and decisionmakers
aggressively focused on meeting the key goals of the E-
Government Act of 2002, greater accessibility to Government by
citizens and businesses, improving Government efficiency and
productivity, enhancing customer service, facilitating cross-
agency coordination, and tangible cost savings to taxpayers
through the use of 21st century technology and proven best
practices throughout the Federal Government.
Today's hearing is an opportunity to examine the progress
of OMB's oversight of geospatial investments. This hearing also
provides an opportunity to examine the cross-agency
coordination in the collection, consolidation, maintenance, and
sharing of that data and geospatial information systems,
collectively referred to as GIS.
We need to determine what programs exist across the Federal
Government, how much is being spent on GIS programs, where that
money is being spent, if data is shared any more efficiently
than since our last hearing, and how the Federal Government is
progressing in its coordination efforts with State and local
governments.
To achieve the goals of coordination across the Federal
Government related to acquisition, use, sharing, and
interoperability of GIS data, the continuing challenge of the
development of data standards and interoperability must be
addressed. In most cases, geospatial data is collected in a
particular format for one specific mission, with insufficient
consideration for subsequent data sharing. That data is useless
to other agencies because the data was not collected in a
standardized form and, thus, not interoperable with data sets
other agencies may hold. This is true across the Government, as
well as in States and local municipalities across our Nation.
This results in wasteful redundancies and a reduced ability to
perform critical intergovernmental functions. With the
development of the Federal Enterprise Architecture Initiative
and its corresponding reference models, an additional tool for
identifying common business lines and opportunities for
collaboration will be available.
I am eager to hear the progress made in this direction by
the Geospatial One-Stop Initiative, as well as by other
agencies and organizations. Not only is Geospatial One-Stop
engaged in the standards development process, it is also
intended to simplify the process of locating, accessing,
sharing, and integrating geospatial information in a timely
way. I am likewise eager to hear about the progress made in
that effort.
While we expect to hear good news in the areas of standards
development and in developing a portal for the collection and
sharing of this data, I understand the news in the area of
collaboration on the collection and sharing of this data is not
as promising. Per my request, GAO prepared a report on the
coordination and sharing of geospatial assets. The results are
not good. GAO reports that a failure of coordination and
oversight efforts have resulted in agencies continuing to
independently acquire and maintain potentially duplicative and
costly data sets and geospatial information systems. We have
much work to do in this area to eliminate redundant spending.
Perhaps we need to consider the creation of a central office
responsible for the coordination of governmentwide geospatial
efforts such as the Geospatial Information Office with OMB.
I eagerly look forward to the expert testimony our panel of
leaders from throughout the Government and industry will
provide today.
[The prepared statement of Hon. Adam H. Putnam follows:]
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Mr. Putnam. Today's hearing can be viewed live via Webcast
by going to reform.house.gov and clicking on the link under
Live Committee Broadcast.
I would like to welcome the ranking member from Missouri to
our subcommittee hearing and yield to him for his opening
remarks.
Mr. Clay.
Mr. Clay. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for holding this
hearing, and I thank all of the witnesses for taking this time
to work with us today.
Although this is a complex topic, with many actors and
agencies playing a role, the issues before us today are not new
to us. From the Department of Health and Human Services, which
utilizes GIS technology for national health surveys, to the
Department of Housing and Urban Development's work in combining
housing development and environmental data, our role in
overseeing the investments made in GIS activities and
technology cannot be understated.
As this committee knows from last year's hearing on GIS, I
asked the Congressional Research Service to assess the extent
of funding for geographic information systems across the
Federal Government. Through that process we learned that many
agencies either had a difficult time providing the necessary
information, could not interpret their data on funding and
activities, or outright ignored the request. One agency, FEMA,
was found to be in the process of issuing a proposal to spend
over $200 million on GIS projects, while being unable to
substantiate their level of spending on such activities. In
short, an agency that cannot quantify their spending cannot be
trusted with an extensive procurement of that size. Thus, it is
imperative that our agencies become more accountable in their
budgeting and performance measurement activity if we are to
develop a comprehensive, governmentwide GIS initiative.
In addition, I am aware that GIS is being used in St. Louis
and across the State of Missouri for a wide variety of
important purposes. I am also aware, however, that many public
officials across the Nation do not believe the Federal
Government provides the type of GIS data they need to meet
their requirements.
That said, I am hopeful that today's hearing can categorize
it for us exactly how much is being spent across the Government
on GIS activities; if the programs are providing State and
local agencies the information they need; and efforts being
pursued to make our GIS activities more efficient.
Again, I thank the witnesses for their efforts, and I ask
that the full text of my remarks be included in the record.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
[The prepared statement of Hon. Wm. Lacy Clay follows:]
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Mr. Putnam. Without objection, your entire text of remarks
will be included in the record.
At this time I would ask our first panel of witnesses and
anyone accompanying you to please rise for the administration
of the oath.
[Witnesses sworn.]
Mr. Putnam. Note for the record that all of the witnesses
responded in the affirmative.
We will move directly to testimony.
Our first witness is Ms. Karen Evans. Karen Evans was
appointed by President Bush to be Administrator of the Office
of Electronic Government and Information Technology at the
Office of Management and Budget. Prior to joining OMB, Ms.
Evans was Chief Information Officer at the Department of Energy
and served as vice chairman of the CIO Council, the principal
forum for the agency CIOs to develop IT recommendations. Prior
to that she served at the Department of Justice as Assistant
and Division Director for Information System Management.
You know, if you are going to testify here every week, we
really need to get you a new bio; you know, she is a Pisces,
she likes long, slow walks on the beach; something. We have got
to juice this up a little bit.
Well, having thrown you off track a little bit, you are
recognized for your opening remarks.
STATEMENTS OF KAREN S. EVANS, ADMINISTRATOR OF E-GOVERNMENT AND
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, OFFICE OF MANAGEMENT AND BUDGET; LINDA
D. KOONTZ, DIRECTOR, INFORMATION MANAGEMENT, U.S. GENERAL
ACCOUNTING OFFICE; SCOTT J. CAMERON, DEPUTY ASSISTANT SECRETARY
FOR PERFORMANCE AND MANAGEMENT, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF THE
INTERIOR; AND WILLIAM ALLDER, JR., DIRECTOR, OFFICE OF
STRATEGIC TRANSFORMATION, NATIONAL GEOSPATIAL-INTELLIGENCE
AGENCY
Ms. Evans. Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman and Ranking Member
Clay. Thank you so much for the invitation to speak today. But
I would tell you I am a Scorpio, not a Pisces, so that might
explain some things.
The title of today's hearing asks the question ``Are we
headed in the right direction or are we lost?'' I believe we
are headed in the right direction based on both the progress
achieved to date, along with our planned next steps. However, I
would like to stress that while progress in the last year is
commendable, it is just the start of the work ahead of us.
There are significant opportunities across all levels of
Government to better leverage our geospatial assets.
The problem is clear: although a wealth of geospatial
information exists, it has been difficult to locate, access,
share, and integrate in a timely and efficient manner. Many
Federal, State, and local agencies collect and use geospatial
data in different formats and standards based on their
requirements. This results in wasteful spending, redundant data
collection, and can hinder the ability of all governmental
entities to effectively and efficiently provide information and
services to each other, citizens, and businesses.
At the Federal level, we are working with State, local, and
tribal governments to resolve these issues through the
President's Geospatial One-Stop E-Government Initiative and
through implementation of governmentwide management and budget
policies. As you know, the purpose of the Geospatial One-Stop
Initiative is to provide all governmental agencies with a
single point of access to map-related data, enabling
consolidation of redundant data. Its goal is to improve the
ability of public and government to use geospatial information
to support the business of government and improve
decisionmaking.
Within the last year, Geospatial One-Stop has successfully
brought us closer to these goals by making it easier for
government officials at all levels to share, coordinate the
collection of, and gain access to geospatial data. In its first
months of operation last year, the Geospatial One-Stop portal
responded to support several national disaster events,
including Hurricane Isabel and the California wildfires. From
one location, users of the portal could access storm tracking,
modeling, weather information, satellite images, and regional
and local mapping services and links to disaster-planning Web
sites.
On the management policy side, OMB continues to issue
guidance to Federal agencies on coordination of geographic
information and related spatial data activities through OMB's
Circular A-16. This circular provides direction to Federal
agencies to prepare, maintain, publish, and implement a
strategy for advancing geographic information appropriate to
their mission. The circular established the Federal Geographic
Data Committee [FGDC], an interagency committee responsible for
facilitating implementation of Circular A-16-related
activities. The Geospatial One-Stop Initiative and the FGDC
have a complimentary and mutually supportive relationship. They
each have a role to play in coordinating Federal geospatial
activities with State, local, and tribal governments.
On the budget policy side, we are working to promote and
enforce Federal geospatial requirements. During the fiscal year
2005 budget process, OMB directed agencies to identify all
grant programs related to geospatial information and post the
grant announcements in grants.gov so that they are easily
identifiable as geospatial-related grants, and report on all
planned geospatial data acquisitions of more than $500,000 to
the Geospatial One-Stop so it could be posted in the
geodata.gov portal in accordance with OMB Circular A-16.
The accomplishments of the last year also clearly reveal
more is needed to improve coordination, communication, and
collaboration on geospatial investments. OMB is working with
agencies on the following activities. The first is on
consolidation of geospatial investments. The Geospatial One-
Stop Initiative is currently developing a process to facilitate
the sharing of existing and planned investments. Second, we are
working to improve intra-agency geospatial coordination. Some
agencies, such as EPA and DHS, have established a geospatial
information officer. OMB is exploring options to solidify the
role and responsibilities of geospatial information officers at
the Federal agencies. And, third, we will continue to build
partnerships with State, local, and tribal organizations and
industry through FGDC and the Geospatial One-Stop.
The work and the accomplishments of the Geospatial One-Stop
E-Gov Initiative and the FGDC are important strides forward in
our ability to leverage geospatial resources throughout the
Federal Government. Integrating geospatial requirements into
the budget process is another key step in promoting more
effective use of geospatial resources. While we are headed in
the right direction, there are significant opportunities ahead
of us. The administration will continue to work with State and
local governments, industry and Congress in pursuing these
opportunities.
I would be glad to take any questions at this time.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Evans follows:]
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Mr. Putnam. Thank you very much, Ms. Evans.
Our next witness is Linda Koontz. Ms. Koontz is Director of
Information Management Issues for the U.S. General Accounting
Office. She is responsible for issues concerning the
collection, use, and dissemination of Government information in
an era of rapidly changing technology, as well as E-Government
issues. Recently, Ms. Koontz has been heavily involved in
directing studies of interest to this subcommittee, including
E-Government, privacy, electronic records management, and
governmentwide information dissemination issues.
Another frequent flier to the subcommittee, you are
recognized for 5 minutes, and welcome.
Ms. Koontz. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member Clay. I
am pleased to participate in this hearing of the Federal
Government's use and coordination of geospatial information.
As you know, the collection, maintenance, and use of
geospatial information is essential to Federal agencies
carrying out their missions. Geographic information systems are
critical elements used in the areas of homeland security,
natural disasters, disease outbreaks, and countless other
applications.
Further, as shown in our graphic display, many entities,
including Federal, State and local governments, and the private
sector may be involved in geospatial data collection and
processing relative to a single geographic location. In this
environment, the possibility of duplication exists, and over
the years many questions have been raised about how well the
Nation's geospatial assets are coordinated.
Last year I testified before this subcommittee that
realizing the vision of a nationwide network of geospatial
information systems is a formidable task, and that achieving
full participation across governments in its development has
been difficult. Today's testimony focuses specifically on how
the Federal Government is coordinating the effective sharing of
geospatial assets. My testimony is based on a report you and
Representative Sessions requested that is being released today.
Overall, OMB, Federal agencies, and various cross-
government committees and initiatives have taken action to
coordinate the Government's geospatial investments among
agencies and with State and local governments. For example, the
Federal Geographic Data Committee has established Web-based
information sharing portals, led standards setting activities,
and conducted outreach efforts. In addition, OMB has
established processes intended to oversee and coordinate
geospatial investments by collecting and analyzing relevant
agency information.
However, these efforts have not been fully successful in
reducing redundancies in geospatial investments for several
reasons. First, a complete and up-to-date strategic plan is not
in place. The Government's existing plan for a coordinated
network of geospatial information is out of date and does not
include specific measures for identifying and reducing
redundancies. Federal agencies have not always complied with
OMB direction to coordinate their investments. Many agency
geospatial data holdings are not compliant with FGDC standards
or have not been published through the central clearinghouse.
OMB's oversight methods have not identified or eliminated
specific instances of duplication. This is largely resulted
from OMB not collecting consistent key investment information
from all agencies. As a result, agencies continue to
independently acquire and maintain potentially duplicative sets
of data and systems. This costly practice is likely to continue
unless coordination is significantly improved.
In our report, we are making several recommendations to
strength coordination. Specifically, we are recommending that
the Director of OMB and the Secretary of the Interior direct
the development of a national geospatial data strategy that
includes goals, strategy, risk factors, and performance
measures. We are also recommending that the Director of OMB
encourage agency compliance with A-16 by developing criteria
for assessing the extent of interagency coordination proposals
for geospatial investments and to strength OMB's oversight of
investments in geospatial data and systems.
OMB Interior officials agreed with these recommendations.
However, until these issues are fully addressed, the vision of
a fully coordinated geospatial data infrastructure may remain
out of reach.
That concludes my statement. I would be happy to answer
questions at the appropriate time.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Koontz follows:]
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Mr. Putnam. Thank you very much.
Our next witness is Scott Cameron. Mr. Cameron is Deputy
Assistant Secretary for Performance and Management at the
Department of Interior. Given Interior's extensive use of
mapping and intrinsic staff talent, Mr. Cameron took on the
important role as chairman of the President's Geospatial One-
Stop E-Government Initiative. Mr. Cameron previously served in
California's Washington, DC office advising Governor Wilson on
Federal environmental energy and natural resources issues. He
also served under President George H.W. Bush as Deputy Chief of
Interior Branch issues at OMB.
Welcome to the subcommittee. You are recognized for 5
minutes.
Mr. Cameron. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I am a
Pisces. I have two cats and a barely in control second grader.
And I appreciate the opportunity to testify before you today,
Mr. Chairman, and all the members of the subcommittee who may
join us to talk about Geospatial One-Stop.
Geospatial One-Stop has made substantial progress during
the year since my last appearance before this subcommittee,
although we believe much work remains to be done. Geospatial
One-Stop continues to work with partners at the Federal, State,
tribal, and local level to assist them in leveraging individual
resources so that they are, together, more efficient, more
cost-effective, and better serve all of our citizens. When
managed properly, geospatial data can be acquired once and used
many times. The portal has already demonstrated this principle.
As Ms. Evans described earlier, it was used for the California
wildfire responses, for some of the preparation for Hurricane
Isabel, and so on.
We are hopeful that as the use of Geospatial One-Stop's
portal continues to grow, we can stimulate innovative
partnerships, such as the National Hydrography Dataset, which
involves 7 Federal agencies and consortia, 27 States, 2
regional organizations, 5 universities.
Another creative example includes an MOU that was just
signed with the State of Utah for cooperative creation and
sharing of digital spatial information. Eleven Federal
agencies, three State agencies, and Geospatial One-Stop are
signatories to that.
The project is focused on four specific tasks: a Web-based
portal; a collaborative process to develop data exchange
standards promoting greater consistency among data sets; an
easy-to-access inventory, a card catalog, if you will, of
currently available data; and what we call a marketplace of
planned data investments that will allow State, tribal, and
local governments to combine resources with Federal agencies on
future data acquisition.
The project's Intergovernmental Board of Directors,
composed of State, local, tribal, and Federal representatives,
serves as one of the strengths of the project. The Board, whose
meetings are open to the public, guarantees dialog among these
various levels of government that have significant investments
or interest in geospatial information. In light of the fact
that State and local governments, quite frankly, own more data,
buy more data, have better quality data than the Feds typically
do, 7 of the 11 votes on this Intergovernmental Board, in fact,
we have given to non-Federal members.
To facilitate the sharing of information, Geospatial One-
Stop led a collaborative effort over 2 years that included a
broad group of people from all sectors of the geospatial
community--local governments, State agencies, private sector,
academics--in the development of data exchange standards. All
13 draft standards for key data layers have now been submitted
to a committee of the American National Standards Institute
[ANSI] for their adoption as national standards. A notice
announcing the formal public review on these standards, in
fact, shows up in today's Federal Register.
The seven major geospatial data layers associated with
these standards are geodetic control, elevation, ortho imagery,
hydrography, transportation--which actually has several sub-
themes--cadastral, and government unit boundaries. We are
hopeful that the ANSI process, which is run by volunteers from
various levels of society, will lead to formal endorsement of
these standards in 2005.
Since we launched geodata.gov, the portal for Geospatial
One-Stop, on June 30th of last year, we have seen tremendous
progress in the participation of State and local governments.
The portal currently includes 1,100 live mapping services; over
11,000 records or data sets owned by Federal, State, local,
tribal governments or private companies; and 155 postings of
planned data acquisition in our marketplace. Thousands more
data sets will be added, we are certain, over the next several
months. The portal receives about 4,000 home page hits each day
and almost 7,000 unique visitors each month. We are also moving
forward with the procurement for version 2.0 of the portal, if
you will. There will be a request for comments going out in
mid-July, a request for proposal in August, and we hope to have
a new portal emerging from a highly competitive procurement
process on line in late fall or in the early winter of next
year.
After my last appearance before this subcommittee, we took
your advice and listened to our private sector partners.
Subsequent to the hearing, when our board got together for its
next regularly scheduled meeting, the board voted to include
access to private sector data through the portal. So since the
late summer of 2003 we have been encouraging private sector
data holders to in fact register their data, fill out the
metadata form and let the world know about their private data
holdings as well as governmental data holdings.
Mr. Chairman, in closing, I really appreciate the
opportunity to testify before you today. I appreciate your and
Mr. Clay's and the rest of the subcommittee's continuing
interest in this project. Frankly, it helps us a great deal to
be successful knowing that you are up here and you care.
I would be pleased to answer any questions you might have.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Cameron follows:]
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Mr. Putnam. Thank you very much, Mr. Cameron.
Our final witness for this panel is William Allder, Jr. Mr.
Allder is Director of the Strategic Transformation Office at
the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in Bethesda, MD. He
is responsible for NGA's strategic planning, including
enterprise architecture and engineering, program analysis,
evaluation and integration to align the agency's investments
with the director's transformational objectives in response to
emerging geospatial intelligence challenges. Prior to his
current position, Mr. Allder served for 4\1/2\ years as NGA's
Director of Acquisition, leading the development of the
national system for geospatial intelligence to national and
defense customers.
Welcome to the subcommittee. You are recognized.
Mr. Allder. Mr. Chairman, thank you very much for the
opportunity to appear here on behalf of the National
Geospatial-Intelligence Agency [NGA]. I have a set of view
graphs that I will step through here briefly, and I want to
tailor my remarks to what is there.
The NGA is both a combat support agency in the Department
of Defense and a member of the U.S. intelligence community, and
that really defines our primary missions and our primary
customer sets. The vast majority of the services that we
provide and the information that we collect and provide for our
customers is outside of the United States. So we are really
here in a support role, and I want to talk to what that role
is, but I want to assure the committee that we and the
Department of Defense strongly support the objectives of what
you are addressing here.
I want to talk through how we are supporting the E-
Government initiative of Geospatial One-Stop, what we are doing
philosophically in the related standards initiatives, and then
leave a few words in response to the question that the
committee posed about whether we are on the right path.
If you go to chart 3, that shows a top level context, just
to show that of the 25 E-Gov initiatives, the Department of
Defense participates in 17. Of those, highlighted in red is the
Geospatial One-Stop Initiative, where NGA is the lead agency
for the Department, working back with DOI as the managing
partner to support the objectives of that initiative.
On the next chart we indicate that we have an MOA between
DOD, NGA, and the managing partner that formalizes the roles
and responsibilities and what we are doing in support of
Geospatial One-Stop, and those are listed here. First, we
intend to provide access, discovery capability for all of the
domestic releasable information that we hold through Geospatial
One-Stop. Some of the information is there today on
geodata.gov.; more will be coming, and I will show you what
that is in just a minute.
Second, we participate in the establishment of the content
standards for the foundation data themes. We participated
directly in four of the working groups. We are hoping to move
that definition through the standardization process in American
National Standards Institute [ANSI] and hopefully onto
International Standards Organization [ISO]. We also have an
implementation strategy that says while we will always have
unique requirements inside the defense and intelligence
community for how we attribute and even look at common features
like roads, we will be common and consistent at a core level
with the foundation specifications that are laid out here.
Third, we are working with DOI on the acquisition of the
Geospatial One-Stop portal; we provide people and some direct
funding to that process. And then, fourth, we are standing up
our own Web presence to help facilitate interaction with GOS,
which I will show you on chart 5, a very notional cartoon for
how that will work.
If you look at the upper right, you will see an NGA
Geospatial One-Stop portal that we are putting in place to
provide support to the metadata harvesting activity down in the
Geospatial One-Stop itself. Therefore, whatever customer I am
sitting in that cloud on the left, I can come into Geospatial
One-Stop and just like I can find out about information held by
the U.S. Geological Survey, we can find out by looking at
metadata expressed consistent with the FGDC standards what we
hold inside of NGA.
Similarly, it is important to note on the left that we are
representing our analysts, our employees in the Department of
Defense as being customers of Geospatial One-Stop. We want to
use the information that is there. We do not want to replicate
or copy it over into our environment; we intend to access
through the Geospatial One-Stop portal.
We are in a security certification accreditation of our
server today. We are also going through a releasibility review
of the data that we will be making available, and we expect to
have this capability operational in the fall of 2004.
On the next chart there is a top level depiction of the
information content that we expect to make available initially
from very small-scale terrain information down to a very
detailed representation of the terrain that was created as a
result of the Shuttle radar topography mission flown in the
year 2000. We expect to make all of that information available
through the geospatial one stop.
Transitioning briefly to the standards development area,
standards, of course, are a major enabler of everything
Geospatial One-Stop is trying to do. I want to point out that
my boss, Lieutenant General Jim Clapper, wears two hats in our
community; he is the Director of NGA, but he is also what we in
the DOD community call the functional manager for our
discipline of geospatial intelligence. That says that across
the elements of the IC and the DOD, General Clapper sets the
vision, he sets the future direction, he orchestrates
investments without controlling them.
A key part of that is prescribing and mandating the set of
standards that will be used for geospatial applications. We
have in place a national center for geospatial intelligence
standards to help us step up to that role. We work closely with
the FGDC, and I will not belabor it, but we, as the FGDC does,
work on an open consensus-based process leveraging industry
standards versus building our own.
Last, sir, in terms of take-away, you asked the question
here whether we are on the right path or not, and I would like
to give you my personal perspective from having worked 30+
years in six Federal agencies, always associated with
geospatial information. From a time in the early 1980's when I
served on some working groups in the American Congress on
Surveying and Mapping, working on digital cardiographic
standards, to today, we have made significant improvements.
And, yes, we can do more; yes, there is a lot more to do, but
particularly in the last several years there have been very
dramatic strides forward. Technology, of course, is a key
enabler of that, and I will not belabor that, but it lets us
step up to that process.
What I would cite as perhaps more important is the focusing
effect of the disasters of September 11. We found in our
community that during a time of crisis, it is very easy to
break through the ossifying bureaucracies we sometimes deal
with and get right to the heart of what do I need to do
together to better support the customers. I think that
atmosphere and that climate permeates the Government today. I
think it will for some time, and I think that has helped us in
addition to the direction that we have gotten to move forward
in these areas to support what we need to do to share and
collaborate.
Second, I think we have a much better understanding today
of what drives the technology market in today's environment and
where the Government should and should not become intrusive in
specifying standards. I think you have heard a lot of
discussion about consensus-based industry processes. We
strongly endorse that as what we must do. If standards are the
area where industry has agreed not to compete, we need to let
industry come to what those areas are on their own. We can
encourage them, we can set the policies, we can provide subject
matter expertise, but we cannot direct that to happen; we have
to let it evolve as it goes forward. I think that has been
extremely successful today.
And, last, I think we have found a good way to balance long
and short-term investments that says simply I believe we need
to resist the temptation to try to push things faster in the
areas of information technology standards by becoming overly
prescriptive on industry. We need to let the consensus process
play out so that we can follow it. That genie is out of the
bottle, and it is not going back in. There was a recent June
7th issue of Newsweek that paraphrased a CEO of one of the
leading GIS corporations as saying that once geospatial
information became pervasively available on the Internet and
could be rapidly integrated into applications, the business
model of a closed proprietary system to sell, to make profit
was gone, was dead; and he and others needed to step up to the
open consensus standards process. I think that is something,
sir, that I would commend. We need to be willing to follow; let
the free market drive where this goes and find the right places
for Government intervention.
Thank you very much, and I would be glad to take your
questions as well.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Allder follows:]
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Mr. Putnam. Thank you, sir.
We will begin with the first round of questions, beginning
with Ms. Evans.
Ms. Evans, last year during testimony before this
subcommittee your predecessor, Mark Forman, estimated that the
Federal Government spends somewhere in the neighborhood of $4
billion per year on geospatial products and services, and went
on to say that he estimated as much as half of that amount was
wasted. I am aware that a recent report estimates the annual
cost to be closer to $5 billion, with a high percentage of
waste.
Empirically, what do we know about the Federal Government's
annual expenditures on GIS, and what percentage of that do you
believe is duplicative or redundant?
Ms. Evans. I would say right now that we still do not have
a good solid number that I can sit here and tell you, yes, sir,
it is $4 billion, yes, sir, it is $5 billion going forward.
This is an area where we are continuing our efforts, and as I
included in my testimony, that we were going to give further
guidance out to the agencies so that we could give a better
definitive answer as to what is the actual expenditures in this
area, how much of it is duplicative, and how much we intend to
eliminate. So we are continuing to work in this area. We need
to continue to give better guidance to the agencies, as was
mentioned by GAO, so that I can provide a better answer. But
right now I would say that we are still continuing to work on
this.
Mr. Putnam. Do you have a ballpark figure on expenditures?
Ms. Evans. If we look specifically at the expenditures that
have been reported to date to us, the numbers are aligned with
the geospatial data collections that are associated with the A-
16 layers. Those numbers are much less, really less than the $5
billion number that you have given. So if we add in the other
efforts that are going on, we can come closer to the $5 billion
amount, but without all the level of specificity of what is
involved in each of these investments, I can't answer the
second part of the question, as to whether it is duplicative
and redundant and it needs to be eliminated.
So we have numbers, but I can't definitively say, as my
predecessor did, that 50 percent of those are wasted.
Mr. Putnam. Ms. Koontz, let me begin with this. Who in the
Federal Government has the responsibility and accountability
for coordinating all geospatial collection and data access
activities across the Government?
Ms. Koontz. There are actually a number of entities that
have some responsibility for coordination. That would include
the agencies themselves. Agencies are charged under A-16 to
coordinate their investments of geospatial assets. The FGDC is
charged with the responsibility of promoting coordination both
within the Federal Government and with State and local
governments. And then OMB is charged with overseeing geospatial
investments as part of their overall responsibility to oversee
IT investments.
Mr. Putnam. So there is really not any one quarterback for
the effort.
Ms. Koontz. There is no single entity that is totally
responsible.
Mr. Putnam. Mr. Cameron, where do you fit into that?
Mr. Cameron. Geospatial One-Stop's role in this context is
to try to help OMB uncover where Federal geospatial data
spending is going on, but I would suggest, perhaps more
significantly, making available to Federal agencies with the
voluntary cooperation of State and local governments, the data
sets that State and locals own and maintain. Personally, I
think if we had better access to the high quality and
relatively recent data that State and local governments are
producing, are acquiring, that would allow us to much more
intelligently, much more efficiently spend the Federal dollar,
whether that is $1 billion or $10 billion.
Mr. Putnam. Help me understand all the different pieces of
this puzzle. How are the Federal Geographic Data Committee's
efforts to develop a national spatial data clearinghouse
different from Geospatial One-Stop's goal of serving as the
primary portal for all GIS information?
Mr. Cameron. OK. Back in the 1990's, shortly after
President Clinton signed the National Spatial Data
Infrastructure Executive order, the FGDC started assembling
essentially a card catalog of metadata on Federal data
holdings. What we have done through Geospatial One-Stop is
taken that Federal data card catalog clearinghouse, I think
made it easier to work with, made it more accessible, and
introduced data holdings that are owned by State and local
governments and the private sector. So you have a much bigger
clearinghouse and a much more accessible clearinghouse than you
did in the 1990's.
Mr. Putnam. Where does the National Map fit into all of
that?
Mr. Cameron. The National Map is a project that is
spearheaded by the U.S. Geological Survey, and, actually, over
the last year we have had much tighter integration between the
National Map and the Geospatial One-Stop and the Federal
Geographic Data Committee. The National Map is about pulling
together data sets owned by various governmental sectors and
making them available centrally. The link with the Geospatial
One-Stop is the National Map would be accessed, if you will,
through the Geospatial One-Stop portal.
So USGS, through the National Map, is in the data
acquisition business, it is going out there and forging
partnerships with State and local governments to go acquire
data this year or the year after this; whereas, Geospatial One-
Stop is a mechanism for sharing that information with the world
once it is collected. And the Federal Geographic Data
Committee's role is to help corral the Federal agencies'
participation in the National Map.
Mr. Putnam. What role does the private sector play in the
collection and preparation and application of geospatial
information for the Federal Government?
Mr. Cameron. Realistically, right now, most--well, I am not
sure of most, because I don't have the specific knowledge, but
a large amount of the money that is being spent by Federal
agencies on geospatial data acquisition is in fact being paid
to private sector contractors to acquire the data. Perhaps with
the exception of the military or the defense community, I think
relatively little time do you have Federal employees actually
acquiring data. So the private sector has a significant role in
physically collecting the data on behalf of its own customers
or various levels of Government for whom they may be
contractors.
Mr. Putnam. Mr. Allder, would you address that as well,
please?
Mr. Allder. Yes, sir. If I go back a decade, we had a
significant in-house work force that was doing geospatial data
collection and production. That has changed significantly over
the last decade. We now rely very heavily on the private sector
and the capability that has grown there to produce foundational
geospatial information for us that we then use to populate our
data bases and support our customer sets. We still have a work
force internally doing some of that work, but it is down to
less than 20 percent of what it was 10 years ago as the work
has moved to the private sector. So we are heavily relying on
partnerships and the very robust capability that has grown
there over the last decade.
Mr. Putnam. Does today's current geospatial information
sharing capability provide the opportunity for military and
intelligence agencies to receive or provide access to data
where there might be shared uses in the unclassified space?
Mr. Allder. I would say opportunity, yes, but I would not
tell you there is a capability for exhaustively doing that to
the point where we understand we are minimizing redundancy. We
have historically had agreements from NGA that would be case-
by-case with various civil agencies for exchange of
information. An example would be with the Federal
Communications Commission, where we exchange information on
vertical obstructions that from our standpoint are important to
safety of navigation, from theirs are important to
understanding the state of the transmissions networks in the
United States. We have case-by-case agreements like that. We
also will get involved with either civil agencies or State and
local governments through civilian agency in the case of
something like a natural disaster through FEMA, and we, in
those cases, would have specific goals and objectives for
sharing information that we are able to do that. But we do not
have a routine way to go in and make sure that information does
not already exist.
Before we go out to acquire any information for a domestic
mission, we do a search to try to find if there is something
useful already in the Government, but that, again, is not
exhaustive. That is exactly the kind of problem, though, that
Geospatial One-Stop is intended to address. We see, as
additional information gets populated there, there will be a
lot more opportunity for us all to be more efficient in the use
of resources here.
Mr. Putnam. Thank you very much. My time has expired. I
will recognize the ranking member for 5 minutes.
Mr. Clay. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Let us start with Ms. Evans. As I mentioned in my
statement, my hometown of St. Louis, as well as Missouri, have
utilized GIS for a wide variety of services and purposes. Can
you outline for us what OMB is doing to improve the services
provided by Federal Government geospatial programs for State
and local agencies?
Ms. Evans. I can highlight it at a high level, but I would
also ask if Interior could also talk specifically about the
ongoing work that is happening under Geospatial One-Stop.
We are, OMB, through its oversight and management through
the Circular A-16, trying to ensure that the partnerships are
there, that they are established so that we can share the
information. And as my colleague said from Interior, many times
the information that is collected at the State and local level
is much better than the information that is available at the
Federal level. So through the Geospatial One-Stop, the
President's initiative, we are trying to maximize the work that
has already been done in this area.
I think that Scott would be glad to talk specifically about
what is happening in the Federal Government efforts to ensure
that partnership and that linkage at the State and local level.
Mr. Clay. OK, thank you, Ms. Evans. I will give Scott a
chance later. One more issue. You know the GAO report before us
today states that OMB's methods for oversight have failed to
eliminate duplication in geospatial investments across
agencies. I know that the chairman asked a question, but let me
ask you to give us specific examples of building partnerships.
You mentioned in your statement that there was an effort to
build partnerships. And tell me also how you have worked toward
streamlining the budgeting process in this initiative.
Ms. Evans. Specifically in fiscal year 2005, we
specifically directed agencies that they needed to make this
information available to Geospatial One-Stop, the President's
initiative, of where they were going with their geospatial
investments and that they needed to complete and send this
inventory in to Geospatial One-Stop. We continue to work with
the agencies to get that information. It is clear through
Circular A-16 that there are oversight and policy issues that
OMB needs to do in order to go forward to ensure the effective
management of this.
I believe as we go forward and with the release of the
Federal Enterprise Architecture's model of data, the data
reference model has not been released yet, and it is intended
to be released; that when you see that, we also talked about
giving additional guidance out to the agencies. What we intend
to do at that point, when that is released, is specifically
talk about the data and how it relates to the circular so that
the agencies will know how to report those investments in to us
so that we will be able to get greater visibility into there
and be able to promote the partnership between the agencies as
well as through the State and local governments.
We haven't released that model yet; we are targeting for
the end of next month to release that model because there has
been a lot of discussion about how that model should read, and
we want to make sure that when the model is released, that no
matter who you are, you will be able to read it and understand
exactly what we are talking about as far as the data that we
are collecting and how we are going forward.
Mr. Clay. Thank you for your response.
Ms. Koontz, according to GAO's report, the National States
Geographic Information Council estimates the cost of building a
complete NSDI at approximately $6.6 billion without factoring
in the likelihood of redundancy and duplication among
participants. Under the current organizational structure, do
you believe such investments would be prudent? And what
coordination steps do you recommend for this project among
Federal, State, and local agencies to ensure that redundancy is
minimal?
Ms. Koontz. To your first question, I think both the
release of the data reference model that is part of the FEA, as
well as OMB's proposal to have agencies report investments
through Geospatial One-Stop are both promising in terms of
providing the kind of complete and consistent and detailed
information that OMB really needs in order to identify and
reduce redundancies.
I think, to your second question, in our report we outline
a number of recommendations that we are making to OMB and to
Interior that we think will help reduce redundancies. Those
include updating the national strategy for developing the NSDI,
the National Spatial Data Infrastructure. We have also
recommended that OMB develop criteria for assessing
coordination when they are looking at particular investments,
and we have also called for various measures to increase and
improve OMB oversight.
Mr. Clay. Thank you for that response.
Mr. Cameron, when will the Geospatial One-Stop project be
completed? And at that time will all of its objectives be met,
including developing an inventory of Federal geospatial data
holdings and encouraging greater coordination among Federal,
State, and local agencies?
Mr. Cameron. Good question, Mr. Clay. I guess I could
answer it on several different levels. There are obviously a
couple of tasks that at some point will have a definite ending.
The standards, for instance, will be completed in 2005; they
will come out of the ANSI process. We will, in fact, have a
second portal, again, in early 2005, late calendar 2004. But I
think in the long run I would like to see the activities of
Geospatial One-Stop move out of a project mode and become a
normal routine way that the Federal Government does business,
moving standards quickly; interacting much more heavily and
much more on an equal-to-equal basis with State and local
governments than we ever have before; more thoroughly and more
reliably capturing our data investments.
So I think sometime, maybe 1\1/2\ or 2 years out, there
ought to be an evolution, if you will, of where Geospatial One-
Stop stops being a project and becomes mainstreamed into just a
normal routine way for the Federal Government to interact with
its partners and manage itself internally.
Mr. Clay. Thank you for that response.
Mr. Allder, can you cite for us any collaboration your
agency is undertaking with other Government agencies, and are
these efforts improving the quality of data and information
available within geospatial programs?
Mr. Allder. Yes. I mentioned several earlier, and I can hit
a few more. I mentioned the Federal Communications Commission.
We collaborated with the U.S. Geological Survey on the
production of information over a data base for the 133 urban
areas in support of Homeland Security. We have a team of our
analysts who are actually resident inside of the Homeland
Security Department who are working collaboratively with them.
So, yes, sir, we have many such activities ongoing. Again,
producing domestic information is not the major focus of our
mission today; we do that on an opportunity basis, on an
invitation basis. But, yes, sir, there are many examples. I
think they are growing and they are certainly improving our
service to our customer set.
Mr. Clay. Thank you.
I thank the panel for their responses.
Mr. Putnam. Thank you, Mr. Clay.
Ms. Koontz, do you have any thoughts on the merit of
establishing a geospatial information administrator within OMB
or perhaps somewhere else, or even a geospatial information
officer type of position within agencies? Just share your
thoughts on something along those lines.
Ms. Koontz. I think either of those positions certainly
have merit to consider. Without knowing further details, it
does appear, though that if you are able to affix
accountability with a single entity, I think experience has
shown us that things tend to get done.
Mr. Putnam. Ms. Evans, what are your thoughts?
Ms. Evans. I have thought about this question a lot, and I
would say that I don't agree necessarily that there is a need
for a geospatial information administrator or officer within
the Office of Management and Budget. I would tell you that
recently this position, the Vice Chair position of the FGDC,
has been delegated to me from the Deputy Administrator for
Management because it is about information management. We are
looking, though, internally within OMB and the implementation
and the oversight of A-16 is it now are we at the point do we
heighten this to the point where we ask the agencies, similar
to the way that we did when FISMA was passed, who is the
central point of contact within your agency to deal with
geospatial information? I also think that this person should be
located within the CIO organization, because the Chief
Information Officer is about the strategic management of
information, regardless of what type, whether it geospatial,
paper, electronic. And so we are really looking at what is the
role and responsibility of this person and how we would like
for them to go forward to get to the issue of accountability
and be able to help the agency with its investments and how to
manage that type of information strategically.
So I don't think that we need one within OMB because of the
accountability and how we deal with things and how we work with
the budget side of the House, but I do think that it is worth
examining how we move forward with the agencies. Two agencies
to date, EPA and DHS, have identified a geospatial information
officer within their organizations. Both of those agencies do
have that position reporting to the Chief Information Officer.
Mr. Putnam. As we talk through these GIS issues, including
One-Stop, which is 1 of the 24 E-Gov initiatives, it leads me
to ask, in reference to last week's action on Interior
appropriations, the bill included language that would prohibit
funding on four E-Gov initiatives. What is the impact of that
language, Ms. Evans?
Ms. Evans. The administration has issued its statement on
this particular issue and the impact of that, and we do, in the
statement, generally we said that it would have great impact on
the ability of the Government to be able to move forward as an
enterprise to facilitate collaboration and coordination of our
resources and to be able to come up with a common solution so
that we can have one solution for the Government as a whole as
we are moving forward and eliminating redundancies and becoming
more efficient. And so the administration has issued its
statement on the effect of that particular language in the
appropriations bill.
Mr. Putnam. Ms. Koontz, do you have an opinion on the
effect that this would have on the mandated requirements set
forth in the law, the prohibition of funding? What effect will
that have on the agencies' ability to carry out their
legislative mandate?
Ms. Koontz. I am sorry, I haven't studied the language in
the appropriations bill. I don't think I can comment on that.
Mr. Putnam. Does anyone want to take a stab at it? Does
Interior want to talk about what is in the Interior
appropriations bill?
Mr. Cameron. Interior very wisely, on matters of
appropriations, defers to the Office of Management and Budget,
so I agree with Karen.
Mr. Putnam. Well put. I think it sends a very disturbing
message to our agencies and is something that we intend to work
through.
We have votes currently planned for approximately 3, so
what I would like to do, if there are no other questions, I
would like to go ahead and seat the second panel and try to get
through the opening testimony on that before we are called
away. So I want to thank our first panel for your insight, and
the subcommittee will recess until such time as the second
panel is seated, hopefully very shortly.
[Recess.]
Mr. Putnam. The subcommittee will reconvene. I would ask
the second panel of witnesses to please rise for the
administration of the oath.
[Witnesses sworn.]
Mr. Putnam. Note for the record that all of the witnesses
responded in the affirmative.
Our first witness is Zsolt Nagy. Did I say that correctly?
Mr. Nagy. That is correct.
Mr. Putnam. Welcome to the subcommittee. Mr. Nagy is
president-elect of the National States Geographic Information
Council. NSGIC is perhaps the primary intergovernmental
organization seeking to develop interoperability and data
standards between local, State, and Federal levels of
government. He is also the manager of geographic information
coordination program at the North Carolina Center for
Geographic Information and Analysis, where he has done work on
national, State, regional and local GIS initiatives, including
efforts to develop the National Spatial Data Infrastructure.
Welcome to the subcommittee. You are recognized for 5
minutes. I would ask all of you to please help us stick to
that. We will have five votes on the floor shortly. So you are
recognized.
STATEMENTS OF ZSOLT NAGY, PRESIDENT-ELECT, NATIONAL STATES
GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION COUNCIL [NSGIC], GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION
COORDINATOR, NORTH CAROLINA DEPARTMENT OF ENVIRONMENT AND
NATURAL RESOURCES; FREDERIC W. CORLE II, PRESIDENT, SPATIAL
TECHNOLOGIES INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION; JOHN M. PALATIELLO,
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATION FOR PRIVATE
PHOTOGRAMMETRIC SURVEYORS; DAVID SCHELL, PRESIDENT & CEO OF THE
OPEN GIS CONSORTIUM, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, OPEN GIS PROJECT; AND
DR. DAVID J. COWEN, CHAIR, MAPPING SCIENCE COMMITTEE, NATIONAL
RESEARCH COUNCIL, CHAIR, DEPARTMENT OF GEOGRAPHY, UNIVERSITY OF
SOUTH CAROLINA
Mr. Nagy. Very good. Chairman Putnam and honorable members
of the subcommittee, thank you for inviting me as president-
elect of the National States Geographic Information Council
[NSGIC], to participate in this important hearing on
``Geospatial Information: Are We Headed in the Right Direction,
Or Are We Lost?''
Mr. Chairman, we make maps for a living, so how can we
possibly be lost? Let me continue.
NSGIC is a nonprofit organization that promotes effective
government through the wise use and sharing of geospatial
information. We provide a voice for the States to ensure that
the State and local efforts form the foundation of a
sustainable national spatial data infrastructure.
Core NSGIC members are senior State government managers and
policymakers involved in daily coordination and application of
geospatial technologies. Our members are nonpartisan in their
passion for good government.
NSGIC has concerns about geospatial coordination in our
country, especially as it relates to Federal efforts in data
collection. It really should be viewed as a national effort.
Rapid advances in technology have reduced the cost of
geospatial systems, which are now significantly used in State
and local governments. To maximize the effectiveness of this
technology, we need to be smarter about how we collect and
maintain the Nation's geospatial data.
Federal Government must recognize that a new cross-cutting
collaborative role is required to coordinate and leverage
geospatial data investments. To put it simply, we cannot afford
to have duplicative geospatial initiatives horizontally among
Federal agencies, or vertically between local, State, regional,
and Federal Governments.
NSGIC members perform much of their work through statewide
coordinating bodies. The most basic principle of a coordinating
body is ``build it once, use it many times.'' There is a
potential that the cost for broad-use data will be higher, but
that one-time expense is still much less costly than the
alternative of redundant and incompatible efforts by multiple
levels of government. Accordingly, geospatial data must be
built to address the requirements in local government
applications. With prudent adherence to basic standards and
best practices, local government data can be rolled up to meet
the needs of agencies at all levels. There are many advantages
to this approach, since locally used data is most likely to be
maintained, accurate and complete.
Of course, it can be daunting for Federal agencies to
contemplate assembling a nationwide data base from thousands of
local government systems, and we also know that many local
governments do not have the data. So this is where the
statewide coordinating bodies come into place. They bring all
of the relevant stakeholders to the table to coordinate
development in support of geospatial data that meet multiple
needs.
We know that statewide coordinating bodies work. What we
did not know until recently was how they measured up on a
national basis. NSGIC membership developed a set of nine
criteria that define a model State program. They include having
a full-time statewide coordinator that is paid; a clearly
defined authority for statewide coordination; that there is a
relationship with that group to the State CIO; that there is a
political or executive champion; that there is an NSDI
clearinghouse, a state-based clearinghouse; that there is
significant input from local government, academia, and the
private sector; there is sustainable funding; and they are able
to enter into contracts and receive and expend funds; and that
the Federal Government works through the statewide coordinating
body.
NSGIC conducted a survey among the 50 States to ask how
many of these nine criteria they met. Thirty-two States
reported meeting six or more of the criteria, including nine
States that meet all. Eighteen States reported meeting five or
fewer of the criteria. What this tells us is that most States
are well positioned to coordinate with Federal agencies and
that there are opportunities to strengthen the remaining
statewide coordinating bodies.
In summary, we respectfully ask the subcommittee to
consider the following recommendations: Coordination of Federal
agency geospatial activities need to be done in the context of
national priorities, not just Federal priorities. One key
element of this is to work through the statewide coordinating
bodies.
Two, partnering with State and local governments is
absolutely essential in meeting the country's collective
geospatial data needs. In States where the coordination
infrastructure is weak, Federal programs can provide a powerful
incentive to strengthen them.
Third, funding streams for Federal geospatial programs must
be adequate and sustained to support development and
maintenance of data that meet local requirements.
And, fourth, better mechanisms need to be in place for
funding to leverage the needs of Federal programs for the joint
benefit of State and local government.
I will close by saying there are many agencies involved in
geospatial information technologies, and many are heading in
different directions. We are not lost, but there are certainly
opportunities to streamline, reduce costs, and yet meet many
important national and local government criteria. Borrowing
from the well known phrase that all politics are local, NSGIC
submits to you that all data are local.
Mr. Chairman and members of the subcommittee, thank you for
the opportunity to share these views with you today.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Nagy follows:]
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Mr. Putnam. Thank you very much.
Our next witness is Fred Corle. Mr. Corle is president of
the Spatial Technologies Industry Association. The Spatial
Technologies Industry Association, established in 1996,
supports the industry's business development efforts in the
public sector, improving performance of government with GIS
technology and promotes the industry and commercial markets
worldwide. Over 100 companies have participated in the
Association's activities. Prior to joining STIA, Mr. Corle was
national Federal marketing and sales director for Sun
Microsystems Federal Inc. He managed Sun's Federal Government
strategic market development efforts for civilian agencies.
Welcome to the subcommittee. You are recognized.
Ms. Corle. Chairman Putnam, Ranking Member Clay,
distinguished members of the subcommittee, I want to thank you
for the opportunity to testify before the subcommittee on
behalf of the Spatial Technologies Industry Association
concerning our views on Federal Government geospatial
technology programs and policies.
I have submitted a detailed written statement for the
hearing record and will only briefly highlight the main points
here.
You titled this hearing, ``Geospatial Information: Are We
Headed in the Right Direction, Or Are We Lost?'' Our opinion is
that we are not lost, although the road has clearly been filled
with some potholes, detours, and maybe even some wrong turns.
Industry is ready to partner with government to build consensus
about the best roadman that will help us achieve the great
goals for our Nation of efficient and effective government
services, security home and abroad, and economic
competitiveness. In response to the important issues you have
raised, we offer some specific recommendations for Federal
Government policies and programs to more efficiently,
effectively, and rapidly spatially enable the business
enterprise of all levels of Government.
This hearing provides an important opportunity to raise
awareness within Congress, and not only about the challenges,
but also about the present power and promising future of the
application of geospatial technologies and spatial data.
I describe the integrated spatial technologies industry and
its various sectors in my written testimony, but suffice it to
say that this growing industry is vital to our Nation's future
security and prosperity. Its success depends on an effective
partnership between industry and Government. For example, the
global positioning system sector grew out of the defense
sector, but now, through private sector innovation, employs
thousands of workers in a $10 billion a year commercial
industry. In addition, the location technology developed for
our Nation's precision weapons systems can now precisely locate
critically injured motorists from an emergency 911 call.
These are two of literally thousands of applications being
developed and implemented by our member companies. We are
committed to creating a private/public partnership that will
depend on private enterprise to develop innovative products
that protect property, save lives, and, through the genius of
private enterprise, achieve low-cost products to enhance our
standard of living.
Federal policies should facilitate, rather than inhibit,
the expansion of our industry so that it can achieve its
potential as an engine of economic growth and jobs. That
industry expansion will result in cost efficiencies in data
collection and availability and economies of scale that lower
the cost of products and services and enhance our citizens'
well-being.
We support moving away from process-intensive and Federal
Government-centric geospatial policies to ones that are market
driven and citizen-centric. The Bush administration's U.S.
Commercial Remote Sensing Space Policy, which was issued last
year, is an excellent example of meaningful progress toward
this goal. We believe that the Federal Government needs a well-
funded, highly coordinated business plan to acquire and
maintain the key framework data layers of the National Spatial
Data Infrastructure through cooperation among State, regional,
local, and tribal governments, as well as private industry.
The Bush administration's Geospatial One-Stop Initiative,
U.S. Geological Survey's National Map program, the Federal
Geographic Data Committee's grant programs, and a myriad of
other Federal programs do represent significant progress for
the NSDI. We need a true business plan for the NSDI and an
integrated applications and systems to accomplish high priority
functions of Government such as homeland security and E-
Government. This new business plan should match funding
commitments to a business case and return on investment using
an enterprise approach that maximizes interoperability,
integration, and sharing. The policies should spur integrated
interoperable systems and solutions rather than single-purpose
applications and data sets.
We have developed 10 recommendations which I will quickly
run through in my final moments. Action 1, is to establish a
blue ribbon task force for experts from Government, industry,
and academia stakeholders' groups, White House, and Congress to
assess the progress made to date on spatially enabling the
Government enterprise and to recommend options for future
policies; adopt market-driven standards for spatial data and
GIS software interoperability; strength the management
structure for geospatial programs by establishing a dedicated
person in the White House OMB Office of Electronic Government;
Action 4, establish a business plan that includes a new grant
Federal funding program; Action 5, develop a national strategy
to achieve the level of geospatial preparedness required to
address high-priority homeland security threat scenarios;
Action 6, support the development of a reliable and consistent
metrics and data about the geospatial enterprise; Action 7,
ensure that geospatial technologies and spatial data are well
defined and fully integrated in OMB's Federal Enterprise
Architecture; partner with industry and public sector
organizations to raise awareness about best practices; 9, more
forcefully encourage Federal agencies and Federal grantees to
make use of standards-based commercial geospatial products and
services to the maximum extent feasible; and, last, empower the
DHS, in conjunction with FGDC Homeland Security Working Group,
to take a lead role on issuing regulations and guidelines for
spatial data security and access.
Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member Clay, I appreciate the
opportunity to present our views to you today.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Corle follows:]
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Mr. Putnam. Thank you very much.
Our third witness on this panel is John Palatiello. Mr.
Palatiello is executive director of the Management Association
for Private Photogrammetric Surveyors [MAPPS], the Nation's
oldest and largest trade association of private firms in the
geospatial field. Founded in 1982, MAPPS has more than 170
member firms. Mr. Palatiello is also president of the firm of
John Palatiello & Associates, a public affairs consulting firm
in Reston, VA, providing government affairs and association
management services to firms and organizations with a
specialization in services to the architect engineer, remote
sensing mapping, and GIS communities. He also serves as
administrator of the Council on Federal Procurement of
Architectural Engineering Services, a coalition of the Nation's
leading design professional societies.
Welcome to the subcommittee. You are recognized for 5
minutes.
Mr. Palatiello. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate the
opportunity to be here and share our views.
As you indicated in your opening statement, this is a
follow-on to a hearing that was held in June of last year, at
which time Mr. Mike Ritchie, then president of MAPPS, was
honored to testify. At that time, he pointed to several areas
where we thought improvement was needed in the Federal
Government's geospatial activities, and I would like to take a
few moments today to update you on where improvement has been
made and where we believe further action is necessary.
In his testimony last year, Mr. Ritchie indicated that
Geospatial One-Stop was akin to a cable television system that
only carried PBS channels or a card catalogue in a library that
only carried GPO publications. We indicated that in order for
Geospatial One-Stop to become a true one-stop shopping portal
for geospatial data, that private data, as well as government
data, must be included. We are very pleased that steps have
been taken to ingest private data into Geospatial One-Stop, and
we give Mr. Cameron, who updated you on that, a lot of credit
for his initiative. But there is a lot more data out there, and
a much more aggressive outreach program must be implemented to
ensure that the entire assets resident within commercial data
providers is accessible via Geospatial One-Stop.
One of the areas where there has not been any further
action, although I am pleased that there have been stakeholder
meetings and focus group studies and an attempt to at least
identify problems, is the fact that neither FGDC nor GOS fully
reached their potential because of their limited structure and
participation. FGDC only includes Federal agencies; there is no
representation by folks like Mr. Nagy and his organization, by
the States, by local government, or the private sector. We
simply do not have seats at the table. The Geospatial One-Stop
Board includes both Federal and State and local government,
but, again, the private sector does not have a seat at the
table. And we believe broader participation by private sector
interests in setting policy and strategy for FGDC and GOS will
result in a stronger offering to better represent the interests
of the American people and business and all stakeholders.
At the Federal level, we have come to the conclusion that
FGDC and GOS are not reaching their full potential because they
are essentially voluntary and secondary responsibilities for
the participants. Other than very small staffs at FGDC and GOS,
for everyone else it is not their full-time job; it is
something they do as an afterthought, after fulfilling the core
mission of their agency. There is neither a carrot nor a stick
to incentivize or mandate conformance. And we think a change in
the charter and implementation of FGDC must be carried out in
order to assure its full implementation.
I think it is worthwhile to look at a little history, and
we have this outlined in our statement. Prior to the issuance
of what is now OMB Circular A-16 in 1953, in the old Bureau of
the Budget there was a much stronger role in what was then
called surveying and mapping within the Bureau of the Budget.
There was a Board of Surveys and Maps that reported to BOB.
That was later disbanded and in the 1940's it was brought into
an actual staff position in the Bureau of the Budget. All of
that went away when the predecessor to A-16 was promulgated and
it was devolved down to the individual agencies.
We believe, as you alluded to, that we should explore the
re-establishment of an OMB office or the committee should be
directly an OMB committee. It is our view that delegating
responsibility for coordinating mechanisms down to the agencies
has not been the most effective model, and that a stronger OMB
role is necessary to make coordination, interoperability,
duplication avoidance, and data sharing a reality.
We would take one exception to a response that Mr. Cameron
did make to his questioning, and that is the fact that there is
still a considerable amount of Federal Government competition
with the private sector in the geospatial area. There are still
far too many agencies that have considerable production
capabilities that both duplicate and compete the private
sector, and a more robust effort is necessary to harness the
capabilities and talents and technology that is resident in the
private sector. So there is not only duplication across Federal
agencies and on an intergovernmental basis, but there is also
duplication of the private sector.
With that, I was going to mention that we are not
proceeding with a good map, but I think my time is up. But
thank you for the opportunity to participate, and we look
forward to working with you on these initiatives.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Palatiello follows:]
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Mr. Putnam. Thank you, Mr. Palatiello.
Our next witness is David Schell. Mr. Schell serves as
president and chief executive officer of the Open GIS
Consortium, a nonprofit trade association with a current
membership of 260 commercial, government, and academic
organizations whose primary objective is to create a consensus
forum and related industry collaborative for the solution of
critical, technical, and business development problems in the
geoprocessing community. In 1992 he left industry to organize
the Open GIS Foundation in order to formalize technology
transfer programs for GIS and related technologies, and to
define and support the development of the Open GIS movement. In
1993 he initiated the Open GIS Project and reorganized OGF as
the Open GIS Consortium.
Welcome to the subcommittee. You are recognized for 5
minutes.
Mr. Schell. Thank you very much. I have not spoken in this
forum before, and I think before starting I would just like to
say that I would like to in effect spend my time clarifying the
position of my organization, and I think that is, in itself, a
kind of policy statement equivalent to what many of the other
participants have made, because what I am concerned with, what
my organization is concerned with is the technology that in
fact sets policy.
I am very concerned about definitions, and you will not
hear me use the term GIS, you will hear me use terms like
spatial enablement of the enterprise. And I am very much
concerned with the issue of clarifying the difference between
GIS application systems and issues like data standards. I think
there is a great deal of confusion in the language that is used
by most people in policy positions in government about these
things. And now I will begin my formal statement.
I am president of the Open GIS Consortium [OGC], a
voluntary consensus standards organization. OGC is a not-for-
profit global industry association founded in 1994 specifically
to address the geospatial information sharing challenges that
give rise to this hearing. The OGC's worldwide membership,
which totals 260 entities, includes geospatial software
vendors, government integrators, information technology
platform providers, U.S. Federal agencies, agencies of other
national and local governments and universities.
To position my organization a little better, I would like
to begin by pointing out that the network of public/private
partnerships embodied by OGC has accomplished literally for the
geospatial information community something similar to what the
U.S. railroad companies had accomplished in 1986, when they
achieved consensus on the adoption of a common rail gage. I
think this is a very important thing for everybody to
understand because it is at the heart of the issue of software
versus data. By having a common gage, they eliminated the
excessive cost of transshipping freight and passengers across
previously impassible junctions defined by differing and
proprietary track designs. What the railroads did with track
gage the OGC has done with standards that enable technology to
transship geospatial information between and among differing
and proprietary computer application systems, with similar
immediate cost savings and even more dramatic financial
benefits for long-term institutional and societal developments.
This is the key issue.
In this light, I would like you to imagine one of the
results of this. Imagine a road contractor who uses one
vendor's software to develop a plan for a street, and then
directly over the Internet updates a city highway department's
street data base, which the department holds in another
vendor's software. Notice, another vendor's software which can
be accessed in realtime. Next, a policeman uses a third
vendor's software on a handheld device to view a simplified map
generated from the highway department's street data base so he
can route traffic around the scene of a fire. The multiple
vendor systems work together in realtime because they use the
same open standards-based software interfaces. Again, this is
the point, open standards-based software interfaces.
Due to the work of the OGC, ISO, and other standards
organization, a framework of standard-based technologies now
exists upon which Government can build at reasonable cost
capacity for interagency data sharing and decision support
using geospatial information. Hundreds of commercial products
now implement OGC member-defined standards. Hundreds of
organizations. Major organizations now integrate location
intelligence as a ubiquitous capability in their enterprise
architectures by implementing the OGC standards. With this
acceptance in the market, we are at a critical point in the
spatial enablement of Government, that is, the barrier-free use
of spatial information in the enterprise.
But important work does remain. There are two kinds of
standards relating to geospatial information. First, there are
the data content standards that govern what specific codes or
alphabets are used to record the details of spatial location or
the shape of geographical structures. Developing data content
standards is the focus of the FGDC. Second, there are the
interoperability standards that govern the software interfaces
used to access, manage, and communicate geospatial data within
operational IT systems, whether located in a single location or
widely distributed among a variety of different proprietary
software systems and the Internet.
The OGC is the only organization that develops and promotes
such geoprocessing interoperability standards. The OGC does the
same kind of work the Worldwide Web consortium does, but our
efforts are focused specifically on geospatial technologies.
Your theme for this hearing is ``Geospatial Information:
Are We Headed in the Right Direction, Or Are We Lost?'' We are
headed in the right direction in the sense that both the FGDC
and the OGC continue to develop the necessary standards. We are
lost to the degree that, in practice, policymakers have
overlooked the importance of OGC's interoperability standards
efforts and have not accepted and done what is necessary to
reap the benefits of OGC's work. A policy commitment to the
development and deployment of both geospatial data content and
geospatial interoperability standards is critical to a national
strategy for geospatial information sharing.
The way forward requires leadership and policies that
promote development and uptake of content standards and
interoperability standards. Our key recommendations are
documented in our written testimony. Here I wish to emphasize
one key observation: The Government's geospatial information
goals would be attained sooner and at less expense, far less
expense if there were stronger agency participation in the
OGC's open and collaborative industry process. Only through
active participation and support can Government ensure that
unfinished standards such as those evolving for broad access
and application of sensor data, geospatial data, geospatial
digital rights management and data security be developed to
reflect the needs of the public and the requirements of the
Government agencies entrusted to serve the public interest.
Mr. Putnam. Mr. Schell, if you could just summarize real
quickly, and then we will get to Dr. Cowen. We can revisit this
in questions.
Mr. Schell. OK. In conclusion, on behalf of OGC, I thank
you, Chairman Putnam and Ranking Member Clay, and the
distinguished members of the committee. And I am sorry I went
over my time; there is a lot to say.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Schell follows:]
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Mr. Putnam. There is a lot to say, and we are going to try
to get to it. We want Dr. Cowen to have an opportunity, though,
before we are called away for votes.
Dr. Cowen is our final witness on this panel. David J.
Cowen is Chair of the Department of Geography at the University
of South Carolina and a Carolina distinguished professor. He is
the current Chair of the Mapping Science Committee of the
National Research Council and has been actively involved in
spatial data handling for more than 30 years. He is also the
co-director of the NASA Affiliated Research Center. He has
served as the president of the Cartographic and Geographic
Information Society and as a U.S. delegate to the IGU
Commission on GIS. During his career, he has been involved in
scores of GIS projects relating to a wide range of topics,
including economic development, land use changes in real
estate.
Welcome to the subcommittee. You are recognized.
Mr. Cowen. Chairman Putnam, Ranking Member Clay,
distinguished members of the subcommittee, it is my privilege
to testify before the subcommittee on behalf of the National
Research Council's Mapping Science Committee. We greatly
appreciate being included in today's hearing. The Mapping
Science Committee was created in 1989 and has severed as a blue
ribbon committee of experts from all levels of Government,
academia, and the private sector, and we provide pro bono
service to the Nation. Our committee provides independent
advice on scientific, technical, and policy matters relating to
spatial data, and we promote the informed and responsible
development and use of spatial data.
Since 1989, we have conducted 15 studies that relate to the
way that we can improve the way the Federal Government makes
spatial data available to all aspects of society. Today we are
pleased to present to the committee copies of our most recent
report, a Geospatial Framework for the Coastal Zone: National
Needs for Coastal Mapping and Charting. This report highlights
the cooperation between NOAA and the USGS to integrate
elevation and bathimetric data.
I will point out to you, Mr. Chairman, that is Tampa Bay on
the cover.
We also will soon release our comprehensive study on
licensing geographic data and services that addresses one of
the most significant obstacles that we have.
It is important to address the specific issues relevant to
this hearing. Most importantly, the Mapping Science Committee
believes that in the last year the Federal Government made an
important midstream adjustment and the path is much better
marked than it was previously. We are pleased to see the
articulation of the distinct but related roles of the FGDC, the
National Map, and Geospatial One-Stop. This model of a three-
legged stool appears to cover the major bases in a coherent
manner.
We believe that the role of FGDC is clear and that the
organization has served as a valuable focal point for the
coordination of Federal activities. However, and this is
important, we do not believe the FGDC has had sufficient clout
to get its work done in an expeditious manner. We have found
its partnership programs to be underfunded, too short in
duration, and not sufficiently rigorous. We also believe that
its future plans do not express the urgency required to
complete their valuable work. We would also encourage the FGDC
to adopt a less Federal-centric governance structure.
A recent committee report provided an in-depth analysis of
the USGS plans for the National Map. We found the concept of
the National Map to be ambitious, challenging, and very
worthwhile. We also encourage the agency to develop a more
rigorous implementation plan to place a priority on building
the necessary partnerships. We are pleased to see the progress
that the USGS is making on all these fronts. The National Map
is the critical data leg of the NSDI stool; it holds great
technical and institutional promises for changing the way that
the public sector assembles, integrates, and distributes
geographical data. However, the plan requires voluntary
participation from partners and unfortunately, from local and
State government perspectives, there are few incentives to
create these partnerships.
Geospatial One-Stop is the third leg, and it represents the
one that we still have to evaluate. The committee has not
conducted any specific studies about this. These are my
personal viewpoints about Geospatial One-Stop. First of all,
and most importantly, it is the place where agencies come
together and define what their future position is on spatial
data acquisitions. However, the Geospatial One-Stop is not
necessarily the place their users are going to go to acquire
spatial data or to discover about it. We believe that the
marketplace will determine whether that aspect of Geospatial
One-Stop will be important or not.
I would like to also comment on the importance of
partnerships and why I believe that the absence of partnerships
is a major obstacle that we face. The Census Bureau and the
USGS have worked to establish partnerships with State and local
governments such as the North Carolina One Map program. I want
to point out the National Map and its partnerships. There are
no Florida GIS operations listed as partners of the National
Map, although we know there are some excellent GIS operations
going on.
I want to comment a little bit about my county, my county,
Richland County, SC. It has very high resolution data spatial
data. I have a little example of this. We have excellent
digital aerial photography, existing building footprints,
highly accurate street center lines, complete addresses, and
all kinds of very important data for homeland security. The
unfortunate message is that this data will not be available to
the Census Bureau for the 2010 census. This is protected by a
licensing program that prohibits that data from going to the
public domain. So I think it is an egregious error to allow
that to happen.
I think I better close my statements now, and appreciate
very much being asked to be here today. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Cowen follows:]
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Mr. Putnam. I want to thank all of you. This worked out
clearly well for us to get through the testimony. We have
approximately five votes that I estimate will be 40 to 45
minutes before we can return, so we will recess for
approximately 45 minutes, until such time as we can come back
from the floor. Hang loose, enjoy your orange juice, and we
will be back as soon as possible.
The subcommittee is in recess.
[Recess.]
Mr. Putnam. The subcommittee will reconvene. If everyone
would please take their seats. And at the appropriate time, as
soon as everybody is settled, I will recognize Mr. Clay for 5
minutes.
Mr. Clay. I thank the chairman and thank the panel for
being here. I will start with Mr. Cowen, if we may.
In your opinion, does the Federal Government have a
business plan that is equitably sharing the cost of building
and maintaining the framework data layers of the NSDI with non-
Federal levels of Government and the private sector?
Mr. Cowen. Let me put that in the context of what I think
is the most important aspect of geospatial data, and that is
the land record parcel data. The fundamental building block for
society is the property that we own. A land parcel, as defined
by your tax map, defined by your county assessor, it provides
an authoritative source of information about who owns a piece
of property, its use, and its value.
I believe that it is important to build what we call a
nationwide multipurpose cadastre to do that. The only
information we know about what is happening on the ground about
property is developed at the local level, so local level data
should be forwarded to States, States should organize that, and
States should provide that to the Federal Government. Right now
there is no incentives for doing that at the local level.
Several years ago, 20 years ago or so, when I first served
on the Mapping Science Committee, the Federal Government never
mapped data at a high enough resolution of accuracy to have
individual parcel level data, but now it is possible to do
that. In the 1980, the National Research Council put forth a
proposal for what we call a national multipurpose cadastre, and
it called for a very strong role by Federal Government to
organize the information that we are talking about. We think it
is time to look at that again and find out should the Federal
Government be investing in supporting the local level data that
is needed for a nationwide 911 system. When you call for an
ambulance, that ambulance should be able to find your house.
Only the local government people have that information.
When the census wants to do its 2010 update, shouldn't it
be able to just go grab the most recent local level data? We
are spending $320 million, the Census Bureau is, working with
every county in the United States to get the best set of street
center line for the 2010 census. We believe that the Federal
Government should help subsidize local government so that they
can use the data at the local level. States can take that data
and do such things as equalization of educational finance.
Shouldn't we know the value of property throughout a whole
State so that we can equitably finance local education? Things
like Leave No Child Behind require that kind of information.
So the answer to your question, sir, is no, I don't think
the Federal Government is doing the right thing.
Mr. Clay. Thank you for that comprehensive answer.
Mr. Corle, let me go to you. Are Federal agencies engaging
in geospatial data collection efforts that could be better
conducted by the private sector? And what kinds of geospatial
activities would be best undertaken by the private sector?
Mr. Corle. Ranking Member Clay, the Federal agencies
clearly have a role in the data collection in this whole area,
going back to Lewis and Clark. I mean, there is a long history
of this. So the question I think in terms of the evolution of
technology and what the private sector role is and I think the
NGA folks earlier today indicated that they have now begun to
outsource some of their needs to the private sector.
Part of our role as a trade association is really looking
at how we can support the growth of our industry's capabilities
to meet these growing needs. And as the capability develops and
as the industry grows, you achieve economies of scale that
lower the cost and make this technology more ubiquitous and
cheaper to address protecting property and saving lives.
So it is really a long-term kind of a transition of
government agencies outsourcing capability, industry developing
capability, and ultimately economies of scale lowering the cost
of this technology. So it is a long-term process, but clearly
Federal agencies are involved in some of this, but it is moving
in the right direction.
Mr. Clay. Thank you for that response.
Mr. Nagy, what incentives could the Federal Government use
to encourage States to better coordinate their geospatial
investments with the Federal Government?
Mr. Nagy. There are probably a couple answers to that. One,
we can take a look at some of the traditional methods, of
incentives of using dollars to provide to cost shares, as an
example for equitable cost shares for data production in local
government and in State government and in the development of
applications. There are other programs where that kind of
mechanism has been used by Federal Government as an incentive,
to withhold or to provide dollars for cost shares. An awful lot
of public funds are being expended to build local and State
data systems, and it is not always clear in where the Federa
share is coming from, and they could provide for some
additional dollars to support that.
The other is relevancy. And I think that when we actually
see vertical integration between local data, State data, local
regional data, and Federal Government and see local investments
in aerial photography, street center line data showing up on a
Federal product that actually has relevance back to a local
,government such as a flood insurance rate map or for other
emergency management purposes, then there is an incentive for
the local community to actually share that data, because it
means something to them in the end. So that joint ownership of
that entire product is very important as an incentive, I think,
for sharing data and working on systems together.
Mr. Clay. I thank you for your response. I think you and
Dr. Cowen make the point that some of this data collection
could be done in a more inexpensive way and a more efficient
manner if there was better coordination. So I thank you both.
Mr. Putnam. Thank you, Mr. Clay.
Mr. Nagy, I want to followup on that. We all appear to be
in agreement State and locals are doing an awful lot of this.
What is the level of maturity at the State and local level of
their GIS information?
Mr. Nagy. There are pockets of maturity that are very
advanced, especially in metropolitan areas, especially in areas
where there have been long coordination programs established
within States. There are pockets of maturity where there has
been a lot of involvement from all the stakeholders, and that
includes local government, the private sector, academia, State
government, and the Federal Government as well.
The business case for organizing data within States is
increasing, and what I am seeing is that a lot of organizations
within States are making their own business cases for
developing their own State-based NSDIs. And I think part of
what we are seeing is the maturity of the coordination efforts
and the characteristics that are described in the exhibit here
that show how important it is to have an authority for
coordinating GIS, some sustained dollars involved in GIS, and
also some of these other characteristics, as well lend itself
to the maturity we are seeing.
I think one thing we don't see as often is many of the
Federal organizations participating in the development of those
systems, and that is one thing that we could actually suggest,
is that more Federal organizations participate and become
involved in the planning for those systems.
Mr. Putnam. Could you elaborate on that? Let us name names.
Which department is doing a good job of coordinating and which
ones are; which ones ought to be?
Mr. Nagy. I can base some of those experiences on mine in
North Carolina. What is effective within States is when we are
working on the National Map program, where there is a liaison
from the National Map that is actually stationed within the
State that is working with us every single day on initiatives
that bring geospatial data programs together between the
Federal programs and the State programs and the local programs.
That is a USGS representative. We would invite other Federal
organizations to do the same and to work closely with us on
developing those systems.
Mr. Putnam. Dr. Cowen, is that the point that you are
trying to make in your slide presentation which highlighted
God's country in Florida? The USGS map from space, or someplace
close to it, just about as useful, and the other one is
Mapquest, that brings you straight into it, is that the point
that you were trying to make?
Mr. Cowen. That is exactly the point I am trying to make,
sir. It is clear that we have Web-based technology like
Mapquest. Mapquest was built on Census Bureau data and it
expanded upon that. It is time for the Census Bureau to work
directly with local governments and make sure that we have
current and up-to-date data. The USGS National Map program is a
voluntary program; State and local governments have to raise
their hand and say we wish to submit our data. I don't believe
that this is any way to do business. I think we can't rely on
voluntary participation, we have to have a series of carrots
and sticks that are going to make the National Map truly
comprehensive. I think it is a real shame. We are missing the
type of data that local government is collecting.
A report that we did on the National Map pushed forward a
scenario that said if everybody worked together nicely, when we
had to do the 2010 census, all you would do is go grab the
street center lines and addresses from the National Map. We
should have a coordinated program, and this was called for in
1980 by a National Research Council Committee, active role by
the Federal Government to incorporate local governments
organized at the State level and feeding the data up. And if
you could do it in 1980, we certainly could do it today.
Mr. Putnam. OK, you triggered two paths here. Mapquest, the
basis of Mapquest is census data?
Mr. Cowen. Originally it was based on the Tiger data files.
Now, the Census Bureau starts with a process of they only have
a decennial interest, right? So Mapquest started with taking
the Tiger data and saying that this isn't positionally
accurate, it is out of date, so we are going to work out
arrangements to track transactions at local government. But the
fundamental building block was an initiative by the Census
Bureau.
Mr. Putnam. The National Map is voluntary. What carrots and
sticks do you suggest to make it comprehensive and complete?
Mr. Cowen. Our Mapping Science Committee met last week and
we heard about a very interesting program that the Department
of Transportation put together. They said we need a
comprehensive data base of all of the pressurized natural gas
lines in the country. Now, natural gas lines are owned by local
utility companies. So how does the Federal Government encourage
local utility companies to provide that data? Well, they said
you will do it in 6 months, you will do it in any format you
have, a paper map or anything else, and if you don't do it, we
will fine you $1 million. It got done.
Mr. Putnam. That is the stick.
Mr. Cowen. That was a pretty good stick.
Mr. Putnam. What is the carrot?
Mr. Cowen. Well, the carrot was in some cases a local
utility company just had a paper map that showed where its
lines were. Well, they submitted that and, in fact, the
Department of Transportation then digitized that, made that
into a GIS data base and gave it back to them. So they got some
value added as a result of that. The problem with that, just
take that little example, natural gas pipelines in the United
States. Shouldn't that all be on a common base map? Shouldn't
we have high resolution photography so we know exactly where
those things are placed? Shouldn't we know how those things
relate to other types of our infrastructure? We don't have this
common base for this country, what we call framework data that
FGDC has talked about. We ought to build out that framework
data, and the Federal Government should help do that.
Mr. Putnam. What is the data framework for the National
Map? What are the stated parameters for the National Map? The
datums that could be incorporated into it could be endless, I
would think.
Mr. Cowen. They are endless. They are absolutely endless.
But there is something that we call framework data. If everyone
has the same framework, which would include a high resolution
aerial photograph--I included that example in there. That is
not a high resolution aerial photograph. In my county, I can
show you one-foot pixels, I can show you the footprint of every
building. I know that my street center line falls in the right
location. So we need what we call digital oriphal photography
so we have a high resolution base so the Census Bureau can put
its streets in the right place and make sure that they fall not
in terms of somebody's property, but on the right-of-way. So we
need that. We need a high resolution topography data base, and
FEMA has worked hard on that. Zsolt didn't talk about the
program that FEMA has in terms of providing what we call lidar
data, very high resolution digital elevation data. In your own
State, it is not adequate to have 10-foot or 20-foot contour
lines, you need half a foot contour lines. If the east coast of
Florida gets hit by a hurricane, you would like to know exactly
where that flood is going to go and what property is going to
be impacted, the value of that property that is going to be
impacted by that.
So it calls for a series of framework data, and then other
people can put their layers together with that.
Mr. Putnam. Mr. Nagy.
Mr. Nagy. In terms of the implementation of those framework
data, those are very, very critical. When we get into settings
with local governments and when they are looking at building
their GIS systems to meet their local business requirements on
a day in and day out basis, they are looking at, easily, 16 to
20 different themes of data that are important for them,
everything from voting district boundaries to infrastructure
and water and sewer; and they are building those for their own
purposes.
One huge objective is to put the framework data sets in
place, into a seamless base map upon which all local
governments can build their data so that those data can be more
easily shared across the board to serve all applications,
whether it is for economic development or homeland security,
emergency preparedness, or conservation and planning exercises.
Mr. Putnam. For all of you, what is the appropriate agency
or department to head up this effort? If you are looking for
accountability, if you are looking for a clear sense of
direction about where we ought to be going, who ought to be in
charge?
Mr. Cowen. I would volunteer that if you look at the OMB
Circular A-16, it defines custodial responsibility. It
specifies which agencies should be responsible for different
layers of the framework data. I think it is pretty clear. I
mean, the USGS, I think, has the lead role for coordination of
those activities, and setting up that framework and getting it
done, and I think the National Map provides the umbrella to put
all that together. I mean, A-16 spells it out pretty directly.
Mr. Putnam. Anyone else?
Mr. Palatiello. Mr. Chairman, my organization has been
looking at this issue for a great number of years, and I think
we have come to the same conclusion or are narrowing our
options to the same conclusion I think that you may be coming
to, and that is that it has to be at OMB, for accountability
reasons and primarily for budgetary reasons.
I have here a 1973 report that OMB did, the most
comprehensive governmentwide study of Federal, what they called
then, mapping, charting, geodesy and surveying. I have loaned
this to your staff. They recommended the creation of a single
Federal surveying and mapping administration in 1973. The model
that they used is what is now NGA. NGA was NIMA, and before
NIMA it was the Defense Mapping Agency. The Defense Mapping
Agency was a consolidation of very disparate mapping activities
spread among a big part of the Department of Defense and the
intelligence community, and there was a consolidation into a
single agency. And that model is what OMB recommended in 1973.
Unfortunately, President Nixon had to leave office and didn't
have a chance to implement this, but this was on his desk the
day he resigned.
Now, the creation of a new Federal administration, a new
agency, I don't think, our organization does not think, it
works anymore, and the reason is that we talk a lot about
duplication and redundancy, but there is a lot of very special
purpose, single-purpose mapping and geospatial data collection
that is done by agencies, and some duplication and redundancy
is unavoidable. And in order to fulfill each individual
agency's mission, it is going to have to have its own program
and its own activities in the geospatial area. So trying to
have a one-size-fits-all agency, I don't think works.
The idea, though, of having a stronger traffic cop in OMB,
I believe does work. Let the agencies still have their own
missions and program, but right now I would respectfully
disagree with Dr. Cowen. We do not believe A-16 works because
there is no enforcement. And I think you heard testimony here
today that steps are being made in the right direction, but,
for example, I have been very disappointed that both the staff
of Geospatial One-Stop and the staff of FGDC are located in
Reston at the USGS. To me, that sends a message across the
Government. It is a message that this is not a high level OMB
activity that everybody has to pay attention to. I think it
sends a signal that is a USGS program, and if we can play nice
with them, that is fine, but we have our own mission to carry
out.
So putting it in any individual agency, whether you try to
put it in DHS or you try to put it in USGS, or any of the
current operational agencies, I think would be a mistake, and I
think that OMB is the place to do it, either through some
position or, as you suggested, some coordination with a
geographic information officer in each agency. But there has to
be some (a) leadership and (b) some accountability and
relationship to the budget process to make this work, and, to
me, OMB is the place.
Mr. Putnam. Mr. Schell.
Mr. Schell. I have to agree with that, but for a different
reason, and one that I tried to express before. This issue can
no longer be looked at as simply a geographic information
issue. You have issues that relate to the information
technology infrastructure of the Nation, issues of system
architecture. I think where you see some of the most important
activity going on in agencies that are concerned with spatial
information, like in Homeland Security there is an enterprise
architecture effort underway. The same is true in the DOD,
which probably has more use of spatial information than anyone
else. You find that spatial information becomes a really vital
aspect of enterprise architecture.
Now, I think that one of the problems we have had so far is
that the National Spatial Data Infrastructure has been under
the control, you might say, of organizations that have been
primarily concerned with geography. It is not geography, and it
is not even framework data; it has to do with spatial
information and the way spatial information is used within
enterprise architectures, it is integral to it. Everything
about the Web, the spatial Web, the semantic Web, these are
things that are embracing information technology issues, and I
believe that if we have a central--I believe you are referring
to the fact that OMB is in a position to provide some
supervision over information technology architecture in the
Government in general--if that is the case, then I see there is
no other location within the Government to deal with this.
I think people don't understand the incredible significance
of spatial information in terms of the way the whole
information infrastructure is being evolved. It is not just
geospatial, it is much more general. So it needs to be in a
location where the issue is management, and not simply a
question of figuring out issues that relate specifically to
geography.
Mr. Putnam. I am trying to digest all that.
Mr. Schell. Well, it is a big thing to digest, but I will
tell you, from where I sit, running a private sector consortium
that deals with major industry all over the country, what I see
is that our industrial base is critically dependent on spatial
information. Almost any major corporation you go to, you will
find that there is a major dependence on spatial information
one way or another. Look at utilities; look at all your
distribution and logistical organizations. You find that our
economy runs to a very great extent on the integration of
spatial information with enterprise architectures. We are
talking about, in a way, in our national spatial data
infrastructure, of enfranchising the whole commercial sector,
and you are talking about what is turning into one of the most
important management approaches within the commercial sector of
this country.
And one of the issues that has been brought up today is
that the Government is depending more and more on the
commercial sector for its spatial data resources. Well, the
commercial sector is ubiquitous, and it is doing more in the
area of developing and using and processing spatial information
than the Government will ever do. So you have to look at this
as quite literally a management issue, and you have to have
ways of assessing how much activity there is in the area of the
development use and general, you might say, management
efficiencies involved in using spatial information, and the
Government becomes, you know, a special case of that.
Mr. Putnam. Let me jump to the private sector. One of the
inefficiencies that was identified in the Federal Government is
the situation where the same geospatial data is being purchased
by a number of different agencies at varying prices. Obviously,
that might actually be beneficial to the vendor community. So
help walk me through where you see the first bite of the apple
in efficiencies are and how that will help the public sector
save money and help the private sector as well.
Mr. Palatiello.
Mr. Palatiello. A very good example, Mr. Chairman. This
came up when GAO did a focus group session with my membership,
and one of my members brought to GAO's attention the fact that
about a half dozen different Federal agencies were mapping
Mobile Bay, AL at the same time in the same year. Now, again,
some of that you can shake your head at and say that is
terrible. Part of it is unavoidable. For example, if one agency
has a lower resolution, smaller scale mapping requirement and
another has a higher resolution, larger scape mapping
requirement, the latter can be aggregated to fit the former,
but you can't go the other way technically, so there are
reasons why two people would need to map the same area at the
same time at two different scales and resolutions.
But the fact of the matter is you had five or six different
agencies mapping the same area at the same time, and one would
say, well, you guys in the private sector, if those were all
contractors doing it, you benefited from that. But think of it
this way. When is the Federal Government going to revisit
Mobile Bay? It is probably going to be 10 or 15 years. If we
had taken that money that we spent in 1 year and duplicated it
and remapped and instead revisited over a period of years, that
would be in the better interest of the taxpayers. The business
would still be there for the private companies to do the work
for the agencies, but it would be a sounder investment by
spreading it over time and revisiting.
Remember that there is some mapping data that is somewhat
static and can be used over time, but also keep in mind that
every time a new road is built, every time a new house is
built, every time somebody goes to the courthouse and files a
survey plat for a new subdivision, the geography of this
country has changed. There are thousands of those transactions
that happen in courthouses in the 3,200 counties of this
country every single day. So one of the biggest mistakes that
is made with GIS, particularly at the local government level,
is they will make an investment in the first year and say we
have this great system, and then they don't budget for
maintaining it over time and the data gets stale and the
utility of that GIS goes down. So if you spread that investment
over time and keep the data fresh and, again, collect it once,
use it many times, and then go back in the next year and
collect it again, that is more efficient than five or six
agencies mapping the same area at the same time.
Mr. Putnam. Does the technical capacity exist under Mr.
Schell's framework that it would automatically update itself,
it would automatically make itself accurate every time there is
a property transaction? I mean, obviously you have to
physically take the picture to see movements of sandbars in
Mobile Bay, but the other pieces of the puzzle, an extension of
a natural gas pipeline, the construction of a new transmission
line, does the capacity exist for that to automatically correct
itself without having to reinvent the wheel, so to speak?
Mr. Schell.
Mr. Schell. The technology exists, it is a question of your
priorities as to whether or not you are going to implement that
in a given situation. These things happen now. The situation
you just described happens now in many places. It is a question
of whether or not you have software architectures that are
capable of integrating the various data sets, for example, a
base data set and then a set of changed data that might be, in
fact, collected with a different system, perhaps a more modern
system, perhaps different technology, and then merging the two.
The technology does exist. Again, my message is that the
priorities need to be set so that we can look more at the
technology. I don't mean less at the data, but more at the
technologies that enable us to automate some of these
processes, because in automating some of these processes, what
you can do is eliminate some of the costs in building multiple
versions of the same data set.
Mr. Putnam. Mr. Palatiello, did you have a comment on this?
Mr. Palatiello. There are not in the commercial sector
artificial intelligence systems where you can do what you
described without human hands touching it and doing some
processing to do the change detection. It is highly automated,
and your second generation map is going to be much less
expensive than your first generation map because you don't have
to go and remap every feature, you just map the changes. But
there is still a professional service involved in working with
that data to identify those areas that have changed from time A
to time B.
Mr. Putnam. Dr. Cowen.
Mr. Cowen. Yes. One of the things that we in universities
do is look at cutting-edge research, and that has changed with
respect to the quality of the data that is being provided now
in the private sector. In this past year I had a master's
thesis that looked at what we call digital globe data, which is
satellite data of basically two-foot resolution, and it said
could we look across our county and identify by using
commercial satellite data where new roads and where new houses
have been constructed, and the answer is yes, we can, because
we have basically 2-foot type resolution.
So that means that you don't have to--a lot of money is
spent on aerial photography missions that cover the entire
county again, when in fact we know all we are really interested
in is where have the changes taken place. So, therefore, if you
can identify where the changes are, even if you have to go out
and visit those things in person, there are ways to identify
where the changes are taking place and then to trap those kinds
of transactions. And, of course, the individual transactions
take place at the courthouse, but clearly, my little example
there is every developer is required to do a digital submission
of any planned subdivision. Now, the beauty of that is the
planned subdivision is in the data base. I have an example
there that shows you where planned roads are. Well, again, you
are on a constructionsite, there is a new house being built,
and you have an accident. In most 911 systems, the ambulance
can't find that address. In this system, with digital
submission of the plans--and that was just county government
requiring that of the developers to do this; you won't get
permission for your new development plans, your new roads or
other type of utilities unless you submit things digitally to
us, and that has happened. So then you trap those transactions
even before they are constructed. I mean, it is happening out
there in local government.
Mr. Putnam. Final comments before we wrap up. We will start
with Mr. Nagy. Anything that you would like to leave with the
subcommittee that you were not asked or you would like to
complete a thought, perhaps.
Mr. Nagy. Well, for the past few years, maybe a decade or
so, we have been working off of this notion of discovering data
for our business applications and our GIS systems and such, and
I think we are transitioned to a point where, because of many
other business requirements that transcend an entire region, an
entire State, an entire country, we need to be at a point where
we have reliable data that is in place across the country, and
that is for those seven or eight framework data sets, and
probably another 20 data sets as well. In terms of maturity,
there are many haves out there; we also have many have-nots.
And then we also have what I call the half-nots, which are the
folks that are in between that are able to participate to a
certain extent, but not completely.
So we have to solve for the complete picture and we have to
solve at the local level, and it has to include Federal
participation. Local government consortia and State government
consortia need to have an easy way to get to Federal Government
to negotiate things like equitable cost shares or talk about
what the payback is for participating in sharing of data and
such, such as the FEMA map or the USGS National Map, because it
really is relevant for local, States, and Federal groups
altogether.
Mr. Putnam. Mr. Corle.
Mr. Corle. I would just make a brief comment. I think I
certainly agree with many of the comments that have been made
here today in terms of the role of the private sector and
certainly the role of Government. I would like to suggest,
however, that we have talked about the stick, and certainly
OMB, as a coordinating body, there is a lot of merit to taking
a look at what their role would be in coordinating at the
Federal level. I think that one of the things that our industry
association has worked on with industry, with our member
companies, is looking at the carrot aspect of it, and a funding
program that would provide resources on a cost-shared basis
over a sustained period of time, along the lines of mapping and
doing it on a sustainable basis that would develop this sort of
national level capability.
So our view of the world would be to first address the
coordination and the issue that your hearing today is focused
on, and then second of all would be, in the medium to longer
term would be to create a national Federal funding program that
would require standards and a series of other requirements that
communities could then make those investments that would
support Federal requirements. For instance, the Secret Service
is tasked with providing security at national events. They are
going to be supporting the conventions in Boston and New York
this year; they were in Salt Lake; they go to New Orleans. So
there are a number of activities that the Federal Government is
involved in, and certainly since September 11, that building
this national capability will support those kinds of
activities. And so from a high level perspective, it is really
creating that kind of partnership, that Federal funding
incentive, the OMB stick that would kind of transform these
relationships so that we can build this national capability.
Mr. Putnam. Mr. Palatiello.
Mr. Palatiello. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Three points I
would like to highlight. One is in terms of intergovernmental
partnerships, I think there are some best practices models that
would be worth the committee's attention. One is the National
Map. The USGS, over the years, with their digital ortho program
and the National Map, have had two ways to provide, in some
respects, both a carrot and a stick, and that is they do what
they call innovative partnerships and what they call joint
funding agreements. A joint funding agreement is when a State
brings money to the USGS and says we will partner with you and
cost-share the mapping of our State, and the State agrees to do
it to the USGS standards so that it contributes to the National
Map.
The innovative partnerships is basically a grant, it is
when Federal money goes to the State along the same lines. Then
the mapping will be done to USGS standards and it ends up going
in the National Map.
The problem is that Congress has not provided sufficient
funds for USGS to meet the demand of what they are getting from
the States. So the demand is out there, but the seed money from
the Federal Government has not been sufficiently appropriated.
The second is NOAA has a Coastal Services Center in
Charleston, SC, where they will do a data buy and they will
provide the geospatial data to the States in a coastal zone and
work with them to have the data they need for permitting and
infrastructure maintenance, environmental management, and all
the other applications that are necessary in a coastal zone.
And the third was a program that is now gone, but it was
called the National Aerial Photography Program [NAPP], and,
again, the USGS coordinated that; there was an interagency
coordinating committee. Their goal was to refly the entire
United States on a 7-year cycle, and they set priorities based
on who came to the table with funding, whether it was other
Federal agencies or State and local government. When sufficient
money came to the table to do your State, it got done. But,
again, that was the incentive, that was the carrot, if you
helped pay for it, you got to the top of the line.
Two final things. One is as long as we have been in this
business, there is still not a clear definition of the
respective roles of all of the parties and all the
stakeholders. You heard it today about Federal, State, and
local on an intergovernmental basis, and there still is not a
good definition of roles and responsibilities on the part of
the Federal Government with regard to the role of the private
sector. The Government is still trying to do too many things
that are best left to the private sector.
And the final thought that I would leave with you, and
perhaps Mr. Schell is the expert and can elaborate on this more
than I, but I am convinced that the challenges and the
obstacles that we have, they are political, they are
bureaucratic challenges, they are not technical challenges. The
technology in this community is extraordinary. For example,
interoperability is not a technical issue, it is a political
and administrative issue.
Mr. Putnam. Mr. Schell and Dr. Cowen quickly?
Mr. Schell. I appreciate the lead-in, because I think you
are absolutely right in mentioning that it is policy issues, it
is not technology issues which are our barrier. Technology
exists right now to do things like compilation of heterogenous
data sets, the integration of diverse data sets, the
aggregation of all kinds of diverse data sets, fusion of data
sets, change detection, I mean, you name it. You really need to
take a tour of some of the advanced laboratories in some of our
integrators and advanced government laboratories to see the
magic that they can do.
Now, the issue really has to do with the way these
techniques are applied, and standards are what make these
techniques applicable broadly across our national resources. I
would argue that it would be far less expensive for us to
create a policy to apply standards in terms of aggregating
existing data sets consistently across our national
infrastructure than it would be to continue to develop new data
resources. We have data of all kinds; there is data everywhere.
The biggest problem is that the systems that create the data
sets can't communicate, and, therefore, two data sets that
represent adjacent areas can't, in effect, be put together
because the software that is creating them is simply
incompatible.
The technology exists right now so that--shall I say the
standards exist right now so that if the standards were applied
uniformly across our country, we would be able to reduce the
cost of compiling some of these national data sets
dramatically, and the question is why aren't the standards
applied. That is what I tried to say before. We don't have a
policy at the top. We don't have a national policy that says
that the technology standards have to be applied consistently.
Now, this is where I think the FGDC has a real opportunity. You
know, we usually think of the FGDC as having a mandate for data
standards. In fact, it has a mandate also for best practices,
and standards for technology fall under that. And I think,
again, that it is that kind of approach we should take within
the FGDC, with the leadership that we were talking about
before, central national leadership that related to the
building of an information infrastructure with consistent
standards, I think we would go a long way to solving our
problems. That is purely a matter of policy and the will to do
it.
Mr. Putnam. Dr. Cowen.
Mr. Cowen. First of all, let me thank you very much for
inviting me today. I have devoted my life to this business, and
this is the highlight of it, so thank you very much.
Mr. Putnam. Thank you.
Mr. Cowen. I guess my takeaway message is if it is
important, it shouldn't be voluntary. That is no way to do
business. A-16 is there; it should have OMB enforcement behind
it. So I think the structure is there, we have just got to
enforce it. Maybe you need standards police or whatever we
need. That needs to be done.
The other comment I would like to make, put my academic hat
on for just a moment here, I am the chair of a geography
department. The Department of Labor has identified
geotechnology, along with nanotechnology and biotechnology, as
the hottest labor market issues in this country. We are going
to face a labor market shortage, and I know that President Bush
has an initiative to try to address some of those issues, and I
think it would be remiss of me not to have at least concluded
with the fact that we need to train the next generation of the
labor force.
Thank you very much.
Mr. Putnam. Thank you very much.
Before we adjourn, I want to thank all of our witnesses
from both panels for your participation. I appreciate your
willingness to share your lifetime of knowledge and experience
and thoughts with us today.
I also want to thank Mr. Clay for his participation.
While the progress we have made toward the development of
standards and toward collaboration on the issue of collection
and dissemination of geospatial data is encouraging, we have
much work yet to complete. Because oversight is not as
stringent as it should be, we still have agencies acting
unilaterally to collect and maintain duplicative data and
systems, resulting in costly redundancies.
Part of the problem is logistical; the infrastructure for
efficient information sharing is not yet complete. But as has
been pointed out, a great deal of it is cultural. Agencies are
not forthcoming on their GIS expenditures because they have
little or no incentive to coordinate with sister agencies. In
fact, they have disincentive: a fear of losing funding for
future years. The fact that agencies are slipping their
projects under OMB's radar is in itself disturbing. We need to
institute more stringent oversight to ensure that redundant GIS
investments are identified and corrected. OMB must be prepared
to withhold funding approval and allocation for projects that
are determined to be redundant and fail to meet the
requirements of a review process.
I believe OMB is adding tools and strategies to address the
issue identified by GAO at this hearing, and perhaps with the
addition of a central figure responsible for GIS coordination
or some similar strategy, more efficient investment and
information sharing will become a reality. I believe that we
are on the right track and that these efforts will lead to
significant cost savings as this work advances.
In the event that there may be additional questions that we
did not have time for today, the record shall remain open for 2
weeks for submitted questions and answers.
I particularly want to thank the second panel for your
patience with our voting schedule. We appreciate your efforts.
And with that, the subcommittee stands adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 5:40 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned,
to reconvene at the call of the Chair.]