Spatial Data Infrastructure & CIP

At the Rocket City Geospatial Conference, the Thursday plenary session focused on the relationship between critical infrastructure protection (CIP) and establishing a common spatial data infrastructure (SDI) both at the national and more local level.

Sam Bacharach from the OGC focused on the fact that SDI’s are only going to work if we know what we are giving to people and they know what they are receiving. Don Murray from Safe Software suggested that spatial ETL tools should allow organizations to migrate from internal data schemas to data sharing schemas that are cross-organizational. Marc Beckel from Northrop Grumman provided an extensive explanation of the Spatial Data Standard for Facilities Infrastructure and Environment (SDSFIE) – a DOD standard that has been in the public domain for 13-16 years. SDSFIE supports a common inmplemenation to maximize interoperability for military base installation, its envionment, and civil works missions. David Holmes of Intergraph focused on harmonization different data elements: data models; data formats; data quality; metadata; availability; services & languages and how they need to be included into a national spatial data infrastructure model. Geoff Zeiss of Autodesk reported on how the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) geospatial management office (GMO) is developing the DHS geospatial data model (GDM). DHS has made $300M available for CIP; $100 million dedicated to geospatial but those developing data models must conform to using GDM.