There's nothing overt about GIS, mapping, geospatial, or any of the usual buzzwords in the bill the House just passed. But there are hundreds of millions for programs in FSA, USGS, USF&W, and other gnerally GIS-focused areas. I suspect Mr. Dangermond's long-standing hometown relationship with the new Chair of the House Appropriations Committee will prove very lucrative to the industry. Thanks, Jack.

As for the quaint idea of an NSDI...it's laudable, but laughable in practice. Not unless a half-million dollars went to every GIS program to standardize their data, and tens of millions to every state so they could collect and serve these data.

You just can't expect a city, county, regional, or State GIS program (of any kind) to allocate scarce resources to contribute privacy-protected datasets to a there's-no-return-to-the-owner-but-it's-good-for-the-country NSDI-like program. The folks who do the real work are already underpaid, underfinanced, overworked, and their data are unique enough (Thanks Jack!) that real sharing is almost impossible. (You say Hydrant, I say StdPipe, she says F_4vlv_6in)

Even if the Feds did pay for such a massive program (apparently not, looking at HR-1) can you imagine the Cook County tax assessor 'giving' a copy of their parcel database to the Federal government, to be published on the WWWeb?

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

With your neighbor, yes. And 'some' GIS programs do so. But return value alone doesn't get data shared. Data get shared when there's either funding to pay for the copy, or an exchange for in-kind products with a neighbor. Soft concepts like 'much return value' don't get data shared; money talks.

Virtually every single State/Local GIS program in the nation suffers from little or no time, staff, financial resources, or has fundamental naming conflicts with the database two counties away. So the transfer cost is very high, when you count the hours spent discussing Extract, Transfer, and Load protocols.

Perhaps most significantly, there's an unfortunate fact that most GIS people have had to convince their funding sources (City Councils, etc.) that a cost-recovery program can be used to repay the ongoing data maintenance (aka aerial photography) program costs. So they can't 'give' the data to a neighbor without a quid pro quo. Even a nominal $50 fee is enough to stop the process, when you start looking at local-government procurement laws. And we won't even begin to discuss the privacy ramifications of sharing real property information or the indemnity issues of infrastructure details.

But all these sort of issues can be worked out over time with a neighbor, because neighbors can talk over the fence and sort out the details. If they are right-minded and open. Sadly, many are not...or are just too dang busy and underfunded to manage their own lives, much less make nice with the neighbors.

I know the e911 coordinator for an upstate county (with a nuke plant in his district) who also manages the county's GIS. He has 'no budget' for capital expenditures. That means 'no budget' for digital media that he won't get back, 'no budget' for office supplies, 'no budget' for the travel time (or transport reimbursement) for that seven trips to the next county seat for the seven meetings it would take to set up the sharing program, and certainly 'no budget' for the hours of staff time spent on something that doesn't serve his county. Not when his bosses boss wants a map for the new subdivision or storm water basin. Ask this guy if he'd like to set up a data sharing program with the next county over. He DOES, because there are people downwind of his nuke facility that he wants to know about in case there's an accident. But he just can't. This is the reality of GIS at the State/County level.

Now ask this guy if he wants to make a copy of his data and share it with NSDI because it's going to result in better understanding of infrastructure management for Federal programs.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Pay him real money to get his program solid, get the staff he needs, and attach some caveats to the money that says - give a copy to your state GIS coordinator - and you MIGHT be able to get some data.

Reality bites, dude.

There is a key concept that is perenially ignored by the Federal sponsors of national-level programs. A data 'originator' has invested considerable time, effort, and usually capital in creating that product. The originator has passed through a multiplicity of bureaucratic and legal hurdles to create the products. Those investments and constraints are fundamentally insurmountable barriers to sharing beyond a one-to-one connection with a recipient. The negotiation of the details takes too much time, effort (and therefore money) to accomplish without a direct connection betweent these partners.

a truly useful aggregation program would fund State-level geospatial data centers, where every geo-program within that State would be allocated a private, secure, and fault-tolerant Terabyte of storage. Programs accepting Federal grant monies would be 'incentivized' to keep an active-active copy of their operational resources [a mirror, with data and software] to provide instant access to the critical infrastructure information...in a secure location.

Once this has been accomplished, the gnat's eyelash details about who, what, where, when, how, why, and how much can be worked out between the data originator and maintainer, and the entities that seek access to these products.

This latter discussion takes years to work out effectively. The data center at least establishes a secure location to pre-position the data and applications to support disaster response, etc., etc. Once that issue is solved, the idea of web services can be entertained.

This is hard work. The technology is dead simple. The people and politics are almost insurmountable.