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| Subject: | Re: GISList: Interior e-gov tack irks GIS vendors (Geospatial One-Stop initiative) |
| Date: |
04/16/2003 10:35:01 AM |
| From: |
J Bee |
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My initial comments pertains to this part of the
article:
"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."
Really? Do a lot of people think they are the top, or
the most widely used? Being a user of various
applications, ESRI is not tops in my book, unless you
are talking about costs. Many features that are "new"
in ESRI products have been in other vendor products
for years. Seems to me that the whole whole OGC
process was just wasting a lot of peoples time, and
that's the main issue.
If they go with ESRI, I just hope my taxes don't go
up...
Bob
Robert Szyngiel <rszyngiel@hotmail.com> wrote:
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
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