Thursday, October 29. 2009

Dangermond on Data Sharing at NASCIO

An article at CRN highlights what some industry leaders consider the most disruptive technologies today, during the National Association of State CIOs (NASCIO) conference in Austin, Texas. Among them: virtualization (if you don't know what that is, this is a good time to look it up!) and social networking. And, geodata and its use.

Jack Dangermond, president and CEO of ESRI, a Redlands, Calif.-based geographic information systems (GIS) developer, said the IT industry has only scratched the surface in leveraging GPS and imagery data.

"It's all about seeing the world as a map. It's so powerful from a visualization perspective, but also from an analytic perspective, with special relationships and how things are related. GIS is becoming embedded within the fabric of government. It's being used for planning, monitoring and communicating with citizens," he said.

"People say the sharing of government data on the Web is the next step for democracy, Web 2.0 for government," he added. "The concept of data sharing is not new. But all of these efforts haven't resulted in a platform to build applications in a consistent way. That's beginning to change. "

There are some key ideas hidden in there:

"data sharing is not new"

Indeed. ESRI and others have worked to offer the technology to make sharing easier (The Geography Network, ArcGIS Explorer, the new ArcGIS Online, GOS to name just a few ESRI efforts). The issue is not tech so much (though that is a factor) but people and policies. (NB Santa Clara County, California for one.)

"But all of these efforts haven't resulted in a platform to build applications in a consistent way."

Is our goal a platform to build apps in a consistent way? I feel sure OGC would say we should aim to build them in an interoperable way. I would argue the core technologies that make up the Web are the closest thing we have to a consistent way at this point.

"That's beginning to change."

I'm not sure to which point this statement is addressed, but there is no question that change is in the air. My sense is the biggest change is simply citizen expectation. Citizen's expect to be able to access geodata and ask and answer questions. Google and others have set that expectation very, very high. Its up to ESRI and other companies (Google, Microsoft and other included) that serve government to insure their expectations are met.