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| Subject: | GISList: Interior e-gov tack irks GIS vendors (Geospatial One-Stop initiative) |
| Date: |
04/15/2003 02:05:01 PM |
| From: |
Robert Szyngiel |
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Good afternoon,
Not sure how many of you out there have seen this article yet?
Comments?
http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2003/0414/news-gis-04-14-03.asp
Interior e-gov tack irks GIS vendors
GIS Consortium, vendor work on parallel tasks
BY Megan Lisagor
April 14, 2003
Under pressure to get the Geospatial One-Stop portal up and running, the
Interior Department has created a stir by pitting one of the leading
geographic information system (GIS) vendors against the work of an industry
consortium.
The Web-based portal, one of 24 governmentwide initiatives led by the Office
of Management and Budget, will house geospatial information and services
supplied by federal, state and local agencies. Instead of having to search
multiple sites and deal with data stored in different formats, users will
turn to Geospatial One-Stop for all their GIS needs.
In December 2002, Interior partnered with Open GIS Consortium (OGC) Inc., an
international group of 254 companies, government agencies and universities,
giving it $450,000 to develop a prototype and underlying architecture.
The consortium's main thrust, which made it a natural for the project, is
the formation of open specifications that enable interoperability.
But after forging an agreement, some Interior officials had second thoughts.
Besides being one of the Bush administration's highly touted e-government
initiatives, Geospatial One-Stop is eagerly anticipated by the first
responder community as a much-needed resource for maps and other geographic
data.
Later, at a meeting in February, the Geospatial One-Stop board of directors
voted to strike a second agreement with ESRI, an OGC member. The company,
which had pitched the department an unsolicited proposal, received $375,000
for a Web portal prototype.
Now, in an ironic twist, the portal — whose aim is interconnectivity — has
divided the GIS community.
"There's quite a lot of confusion about the process of Geospatial One-Stop,
and the OMB could help by adding public clarity to the situation," said Tim
Milovich, chief executive officer of Questerra LLC, an OGC member.
Consortium members believed their prototype would serve as the basis for a
future procurement, not as a procurement itself.
"The lack of clarity in the situation as developed creates a perception that
OGC and its member team are competing with another member," said Jeff
Burnett, the consortium's vice president of operations and finance. "That's
simply not in the interest of any members. If this had been set up as a
competition for the prototype, then OGC would not have bid.
"Its members would have been the entities to bid," he continued. "Basically,
we're not the vendor."
For its part, Interior maintains that heightened expectations and increased
urgency forced it to take a second look.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency "and folks in homeland security and
the emergency response community are very interested in getting access to
geospatial information as soon as possible," said Scott Cameron, Interior's
deputy assistant secretary for performance and management. "We need to get
something out there in the near term that the community can use."
As a result, Interior moved from seeking a working prototype to a production
prototype, and that prompted it to consider a commercial-off-the-shelf
solution.
The demands on the department reflect Geospatial One-Stop's importance to
first responders. Firefighters, police officers and emergency medical
technicians rely on geospatial information to mitigate and respond to
disasters, including natural catastrophes and terrorism. Right now, much of
the data is difficult to access.
"Homeland security is very concerned about first responders," said Carol
Kelly, vice president of strategy for META Group Inc. "This is serious
stuff. We're trying to get the gaps closed as quickly as we can."
OGC saw the prototype as the opposite of a competition, as a chance to
cooperate across companies.
"There is a willingness among the vendor community to make this work as a
team," said George Moon, chief technology officer at MapInfo Corp., an OGC
member.
But business is business and ESRI spotted an opportunity, observers say.
"ESRI has an excellent reputation and a lot of people consider them the top
in their field," said Larry Allen, executive vice president of the Coalition
for Government Procurement.
The company is behind the Bureau of Land Management's GeoCommunicator
portal, experience that factored into Interior's decision to give it a go,
according to Cameron.
"We've done lots of work doing similar kinds of things," said Pete
Bottenberg, a senior consultant at ESRI, which is working on the prototype.
Also potentially acting in the com-pany's favor is its selection by Interior
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