Dangermond Addresses Data.gov Ahead of Gov 2.0 Talk
The article in InformationWeek is a preview of his talk at Gov 2.0 next week, but for those still wondering about Esri role in Data.gov, Dangermond, described as a GIS expert in the opening sentence, offers some insight.
While I’m very excited about what Data.gov has accomplished, I think we need to now evolve our thinking from ‘Data.gov’ to ‘Understanding.gov,’ ” Dangermond said. “This would require more thinking and some additional work on the government side. . . but the results will be enormous.”
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ESRI plans to help Uncle Sam add more data-integrated maps to the Data.gov site, which provides government data on spending, regulatory activities and more, to make that information easier to understand and be manipulated by the public.As it exists now, Data.gov provides a geoviewer that lets users view data sets on an interactive map, overlay them and look more closely at the data. However, it’s not a full-fledged GIS, which would give people the ability to do deeper analysis with the data sets, Dangermond said.
“With the exception of programmers or technical people, it is very hard for normal people—i.e., citizens—to take government data sets, manipulate them and turn them into useful information products,” he said.
Other news of note:
ESRI plans to launch a new Web-based tool called Community Analyst that takes data sets from federal, state and local government and integrates the data into a mapping application. Government agencies and others can use the data to do policy planning and community analysis, among other things, Dangermond said. The site is a companion to one ESRI already offers for business users called Business Analyst.
That was noted at Esri UC (APB coverage).
Also along the lines of making GIS more user-friendly, Dangermond will introduce ArcGIS.com, a social-networking site that lets people share maps and data sets, and lets others discover them in a similar way to finding photos on Flickr.
As we know, that’s already up and running.
