And now a word from Massachusetts…

I recall an op-ed in the Boston Globe from a few weeks back because the writer, commenting on what governor elect of the Commonweath of Massachusetts should do, noted Washington DC’s use of Google mashups to track potholes (or something public worksy like that). I recall thinking, “gee, does this guy know about what MassGIS does?,” and left it at that. MassGIS lead Christian Jacqz seems to have had the same thought and followed up with a detailed reply, which W. David Stephenson in his blog. Stephenson detailed what he learned from Jacqz:

the Commonwealth is taking the lead in one area of innovation: its web mapping services were honored as an “Exemplary System in Government” in the 2005 URISA competition’s Enterprise Systems category. The services are available to communities, regional planning authorities, and state agencies, and the tech support include a wiki (kewl: 50 extra points, guys and gals!). It supports kml (the language for Google mashups) with a mapping engine called Geoserver as well as a richer and more sophisticated xml-based protocol put out by the Open Geospatial Consortium (didn’t know about them—neat!)—add another 50 points each for xml and open source! Among other uses, Jacqz says MassGIS lets communities and state agencies build their own map-enabled web sites to display locations of interest (e.g., closest state office offering a given service) and also to collect data (such as exact facility locations from knowledgeable individuals, plotted on top of imagery—that sounds particularly relevant to homeland security in terms of critical infrastructure protection). He also told me that commercial on-line mapping applications use MassGIS’ orthophotos (e.g., what Google calls “satellite” images) and the office is also working with Navteq in a public-private partership to improve the completeness of the digital road map and the “hit rate” on geocoding.