Latest CRS Report: More Work on Geospatial Data Management Needed

The report by Peter Folger, Congressional Research Service Specialist in Energy and Natural Resources Policy, is titled Issues and Challenges for Federal Geospatial Information and dated April 27, 2012. (full report in PDF, via FAS since these reports are not automagically public...see APB coverage)

I found the takeaway, with help from HST (cited below), to be:

In 2004, GAO acknowledged that the federal government, through the FGDC and Geospatial One-Stop project, had taken actions to coordinate the government’s geospatial investments, but that those efforts had not been fully successful in eliminating redundancies among agencies. As a result, federal agencies were acquiring and maintaining potentially duplicative data sets and systems.

Since then it is not clear whether federal agencies are successfully coordinating among themselves and measurably eliminating unnecessary duplication of effort.

Were Congress to take a more active oversight role overseeing the federal geospatial enterprise it could evaluate whether specific recommendations from nonfederal stakeholders have been addressed. For example, the National Geospatial Advisory Committee recommended that OMB and FGDC strengthen their enforcement of Circular A-16 and Executive Order 12906.

However, enforcement alone may not be sufficient to meet the current challenges of management, coordination and data sharing. The issuance of supplemental guidance to Circular A-16 by OMB in November 2010 may instigate new activity among and between agencies, which could spill over into better coordination with the state and local governments and the private sector. It will likely take some time, and several budget cycles, to track whether agencies are adhering to the ‘portfolio-centric model’ of geospatial data management outlined in the supplemental guidance. It may also take time to evaluate whether the ‘portfolio-centric model’ is the best available model for managing the federal geospatial assets.

- Homeland Security Today via @jeffharrison

GISnation Launches

You may have seen its pre-launch tweets, posts on Facebook and elsewhere but now this new social network is live. This morning I asked for its elevator pitch. Here it is:

Directions Magazine’s NewsMap Features - Search and Display

We lauched NewsMap today...perhaps you've already seen it on our "yellow tab" on Directions Magazine. Our friends at Spatial Ideas developed this version of their LocoBuzz web mapping application specifically for us so that we could display our press releases and blog posts in a geographical index. I've been wanting to do this for years...kinda made sense for an online geospatial technology magazine to actually use a web map app in some way, no?

You'll note that we've released this in "beta" for now and we're interested in your feedback. But I encourage you to play around with its features.

For example (refere to image at right; click for larger graphic), the first thing you will notice is that there are a few symbols on the map with numbers in the middle. Keep clicking on the symbol (hopefully that's intuitive" and you'll zoom into the area of interest; more symbols may appear but hovering the mouse over the symbol will display a box with a brief caption of a press release or article. You'll see the headline and first few lines of the text. You can dismiss the box or click on the "newspaper" icon to go directly to the full version of the article; click the Facebook icon to post to Facebook.

You can also search for news. Use the search box to type in a word or phrase and it will search a 30-day archive of news. Check the "Get Latest Tweets" box and it will add tweets as well. Check the "Hide News" box to see only tweets. Check "Refresh" to bring you back to the original news selections.

At the bottom of the map is our news scroll for the past 24-hours. This will show you the latest news in the form of scolling boxes. Click the "i" icon to zoom into the location of the news and to display the news box. Click anywhere on the map and the scroll box turn into a single scroll line. Double-click the scroll line to go back to the scroll boxes.

For more information about the technology behind NewsMap, see our article today on our home page of Directions Magazine.

Location Intelligence in the Fast Lane - The Alteryx Grand Prix

How much time would it take you to solve a geospatial business problem using your GIS modeling software? What if you had to do it in 15 minutes? That’s what ten contestants in the Alteryx Grand Prix faced. And proficiency mattered with an all expense paid trip to “Sin City” on the line. (see images at right; click for larger image)

During the Alteryx User Conference this week in Broomfield, Colorado, experienced Alteryx engine users volunteered to go against the clock to solve three, sometimes bizarre challenges within a limited period of time. Scoring was based not only on finishing before the allotted time but also on proficiency with the program and whether they obtained the right answer. Competitors are free to solve the problem in whatever way they want but their resulting module is run against a preferred workflow developed by the Alteryx development team to test the proficiency of the user.

Each “driver” in the grand prix has an identical workstation plus an Alteryx employee as their “pit crew” to verify the time and answer given and has the option of a “lifeline” or the ability to “ask the expert” to get some assistance from Alteryx development team members.

Here’s an example of one of the challenges faced by the competitors: Which US state if you take the number of vowels in its name squared, multiplied by the number times the letters "a, l, t, e r, y, x" appear in its name cubed, multiplied by its area to the nearest 1000 sq. miles gives you its current year population estimate spring 2010 to within 10,000. Just understanding the question was a challenge...and this was just the first of three questions they had to answer with Alteryx.

The result is a very intense, under the gun, scenario which forces the contestant to be either very creative or…guess. And sometimes approximating the answer is a viable way to go. But more importantly, the entire Grand Prix was to illustrate the ease with which complex models can be built. Many users with whom I have spoken believe that Alteryx’s advantage is that the modeling tools are built into the software so they can spend less time building the solution and more time iterating solutions and analyzing the results. It was an innovative way to demonstrate the product to other users.

[Disclosure: Alteryx supported travel to the conference]