Update 1: A Third Proposal Regarding Geo and the Stimulus: Investing in NSDI

Update 1/28: NSGIC has endorsed this proposal, along with the earlier GIS for the Nation proposal.

—- original post 1/24/09——

The proposal is titled “A Proposal for Reinvigorating the American Economy Through Investment in the US National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI)” (pdf) and is credited (with reference to employers) to:
Lisa Campbell, Autodesk
Dr. John Curlander, Microsoft
Steven R. Hagan, ORACLE, USA
Michael T. Jones, Google
Gen. Jack Pellicci, U.S. Army (Ret.), Intergraph

Michael Jones sent on the link. The vision here is to focus on where to invest to get an effective NSDI up and running. The proposal focuses on two specific areas:

1. Funding for the immediate launch of a geospatial data collection and processing initiatives designed to fuel ongoing and future NSDI development and maximize critical economic benefits, an approach not inconsistent with the expressed sentiment of the US Government’s National Geospatial Advisory Council’s (NGAC) transition recommendations to the new Administration (October 2008).

2. Direct funding and agency by agency mandates to initiate concerted public/private partnership efforts to design and deploy a nationally-scalable, interoperable, secure, and reliable NSDI including urban design, infrastructure and modeling data, building on the currently available – and already sufficient—data coordination efforts and standards-related organizations and programs.  This collaborative effort would focus on ensuring that geospatial data collected in the past, present and future will be seamlessly available to American state/local/Federal government organizations, American citizens, and American industry. 

The proposal goes to be realistic about how these two parts should evolve, and that a quick start is not realistic for NSDI as a job creation tool.

However, while an NSDI could begin design immediately, it is unrealistic to believe that it would be deployed fast enough to speed the start of job-rich physical infrastructure projects funded under the stimulus plan.  It is simply not feasible that a technical system of national proportions could be developed and deployed that quickly.  And, virtually every Federal agency already has enterprise licenses of basic GIS technology to plan projects.  However, it is feasible that geospatial data be collected on these projects as they evolve, and made available via the NSDI as it is implemented. 

There is heavy mention of NGAC’s transition document, OGC, SOA and some Google and Microsoft products as examples of “how the availability of extensive, high resolution, geospatial data has enabled world-changing applications.” I saw no reference to the GIS for the Nation proposal, so the relationship to that document is unclear.