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| Subject: | Re: GISList: Interior e-gov tack irks GIS vendors (Geospatial One-Stop
initiative) |
| Date: |
04/18/2003 09:30:01 AM |
| From: |
Adrian |
|
|
I concur.
Adrian
----- Original Message -----
From: "J Bee" <mapcmon@yahoo.com>
To: <gislist@geocomm.com>
Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2003 10:34 AM
Subject: Re: GISList: Interior e-gov tack irks GIS vendors (Geospatial
One-Stop initiative)
> 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 seeki
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