Tuesday, March 9. 2010

#NSGICMidyear: USDA, DOI, EPA GIO Panel

Stephen Lowe is the GIO for USDA. He addressed the move and exploration of the agency toward an enterprise GIS solution that offers services. USDA has 100,000 employees with 10 agencies using GIS in their day to day workings, while others take advantage of GIS and geospatial thinking but not as formally or often.

There are five strategic priorities for USDA:

- creating of wealth in rural communities
- conservation, restoration and resilience of national forests and private working lands
- access for children to healthy food
- be sure constituents know what we offer
- missed one

USDA is looking toward software as a service but need a strong data management solution to power it.

Opportunities for partners include addressing:
Sensor Networks - human and automated
Geospatial-Economic Modeling - develop good science of performance, what are the metrics
Facilitate Equity - getting agile “apps” out to everyone
Customer/Partner Relationship Management
Production Process Management - make sure we are using right tools
Map Alternative Views Outcomes - using GIS sociologically

Karen Siderelis is GIO of DOI. She notes these key trends she's observed:

- move from only coordination and standards toward shared operation capacity
- move from base data (collection) to geo-enabling everything
- move from data to places and issues of importance

The DOI GIO Portfolio includes external responsibilities FGDC chair, NGAC oversight, Geospatial Line of Business (GLOB) oversight and internal responsibility including managing nine bureaus, geospatial data and tech use, “enhanced geospatial governance” (secretarial order from DOI).

DOI Mission and Programs: “we protect America’s natural resources and cultural heritage” (Salazar) via nine bureaus (Indian Affairs, Indian Education, Bureau of Reclamation, USGS, National Park Service, Fish and Wildlife, Bureau of Land Management, Minerals Management Service, Office of Mining). The DOI website says there are eight bureaus and a different list.

DOI 2010 activites: ARRA, Data.gov, Let’s Move, Place Based Initiative, Emergency Operations, Coordinated Land Acquisition, Great Outdoors, Youth in Nat. Resources, New Management Capabilities which are being launched with geo capabilities.

FY 2011 Budget was release Feb 1 and reflected "making tough choices in hard times" per Secretary Salazar. Thus the focus is on strategic investments in high priority goals. Data integration and collaboration are key. The budget is .3% below 2010 enacted budget.

Highlights in the budget (for Interior):

New Energy Frontier (investment in renewable energy on public lands)
Climate Change Adaptation
Empowering Tribal Nations
WaterSMAART
Treasured Landscapes
Youth in Natural Resources - CCC-like org

Smaller highlights: Wildfire Management, Wild Horses, Landsat Data Continuity Mission ($13 M+), National Geospatial Program (decrease in funding)

"Investments will be based on business need..."

Jerry Johnston GIO at EPA spoke to the National Environmental Information Exchange Network (NEIEN), a place where we can really work together. Formed in 2002 to solve some business problems like asking for same data over and over, funding data sharing, maintaining high quality data. It involved a $150 million investment.

The network has a community defined XML schema. Those SML packages are shared securely and operated on via services. It’s operational in 50 states and several Tribes are working to join.

NEIEN has a grant program! EPA wants to expand the network to support environmental decision making and better serve customer needs. In 2010 the program had $10M for 40-50 2 year grants of $50-250K. Those will be announced this month. The priorities are to finish any missing key system data (required by law), to geospatially enable data, to move from one way to two way data distribution - by publishing OGC services.

What’s next? More guided grant funding, guidance/implementation of geospatial interoperability. There is open source node software. Big question: How do we work as a community to move these forward.

Q: Abuse of GSA schedule update? A letter was sent to you.
A: (DOI) No resolution. In Work.

Q: Challenge Grants - will they be open to more entities in future? We have to wait for lead entity to decide if they are going to bid....
A: (EPA) I can’t answer with authority. So far community is limited to state DEPs and DEQs - but we need to invite more people.

Q: (John P) Is there recognition in gov that we don’t have an NSDI to monitor climate change? What are we doing about that?
A: (USDA) Plant hardiness map had to go through vetting through internal science community and administration. Took a while. Would be worse if had to go through all those agencies. (DOI) We know we don’t have a good capability here, but pooled could be more than the sum of the parts. Some collaborative centers will help, but there is no comprehensive approach - but it should be through the Geospatial Platform. Climate is a business driver. Over the last two years there’s been a significant step in FGDC and other collaboration, so that’ll help, too. (EPA) I agree with what you are saying. We don’t have high res coastal elevation data. There are data gaps that have hamstrung us. Positive: Some of the language in government is getting agencies to talk together. There’s been movement toward working together. I agree the Geospatial Platform is the place to take this forward.

Q: Speak to cuts in Nat Geo Program cuts and what we can do.
A: Cut is about $3M. “tough decisions in hard economic times” “budgets change”

Q: Are the goals of USGA and DOI aligning in the cuts?
A: I hear you.

(USDA) It’s huge to have three GIOs sitting next to each other. We are working to mitigate risks of our constituents (like the budget). Now we can present a different (united) business case. [More than one person pointed out to me that these DOI should sit down together regularly, but based on their presentations, they do not.]

Q: What are opportunites to link your network to data.gov?
A: (EPA) Looking at Web Services APIs. No concrete plan - but state partners want to publish their data, takes burden off them.

Q: Budget cuts - COGO is preparing a letter.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in NSGIC 10 Mid-Year at 11:46 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0) |

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Great to hear that Jerry is promoting the network for data sharing at NSGIC! It's high time the traditional geospatial community learned more about it. Shame to see a well-established national network of web services for data sharing not being leveraged fully by the geospatial community. Rather than reinventing the wheel so many times, perhaps other Federal Agencies should start using it. There are several open source Exchange Network node platforms available now. Check out OpenNode2 - a community data sharing project if there ever was one.

#1 NEIEN geo-partner on 2010-03-11 07:46 (Reply)

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