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| GeoCommunity Mailing List |
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| Mailing List Archives |
| Subject: | RE: GISList: Interior e-gov tack irks GIS vendors (Geospatial One-Stop initiative) |
| Date: |
04/18/2003 01:50:00 PM |
| From: |
Dimitri Rotow |
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Well it seems it doesn't make much difference whether they choose
living-fossil technology from ESRI or living-fossil pseudo-technology from
OGC. Either way it will have zero effect on whether or not they achieve
their stated goals, which depend more upon the politics between agencies and
whether or not those argencies are well-managed or poorly managed, than upon
which particular technology they choose to implement the project. As has
been said, "a talented man with an abacus can achieve more than a fool with
a calculator."
Consider the goals:
> >
> > The project has four primary goals:
> >
> > * Improve the sharing of geospatial information across
> > federal, state and
> > local agencies.
> >
> > * Improve planning for future investments in
> > geospatial data.
> >
> > * Support cross-government partnerships on geospatial
> > projects.
> >
> > * Foster the development of geospatial-related
> > standards.
> >
If we are to suspend our cynicism for a moment and take the above goals
seriously, the key question to ask is "Are they taking reasonable measures
to achieve these goals with the tools and standards already at hand?" The
answer in this case is a resounding "No," and that's a "No" because many
agencies simply don't want to share data with the public or even with each
other and won't release data unless they are dragged into court and
compelled to do so.
Let's try a thought experiment: suppose agencies really wanted to share
data - why not use SDTS and simply put everything up for free download via
FTP? SDTS is a perfectly good, non-proprietary standard suitable for a very
wide range of data that is supported by a wide range of modern GIS packages.
FTP or similar is low-cost, fast and highly effective as the various USGS
web sites have proven over the years. You don't need much in the way of a
web front end to make it possible for people to browse and find data,
assuming that data's available in the first place. You certainly don't need
some ponderous bureaucracy coupled with designer obstacles to fast access
developed by the famously "unopen" crowd at either OGC or ESRI.
My point is this: if agencies are not using perfectly good Federal
geospatial standards like SDTS to provide fast, effective and
non-proprietary access to data using perfectly good, widespread Internet
technologies, then one would have to be naive to expect that they would
suddenly decide to share data, etc, as a result of this particular project.
Whether they use ESRI or OGC will have no effect on that.
So, let me make a prediction what's going to come out of this project in the
next year or two:
1) There will be no net increase in data available to the public or to local
agencies.
2) Some agencies will use this project to reduce the amount of data that can
be fetched from their sites, using this project as an excuse to say the data
is still available.
3) Rather than have a high performance interface, like FTP, that allows
people to fetch massive amounts of data using widely available tools, this
project will build a "webstacle" that will make it difficult and slow for
power users to download large data sets or many data sets at once.
4) The result will be so slow and frustrating to use that for important data
sets knowledgeable people will go to the originating agency's FTP sites, if
available, and bypass the "portal."
5) Rather than build on existing, open, non-proprietary standards like SDTS,
this project will end up introducing yet more fragmentation through
quasi-standards and various proprietary formats unsupported by commercial
products that 95% of users can afford, but will call such closed efforts
"open."
6) Two years from now, there will be no "geospatial-related standards" in
regular use by more than 1% of GIS users that were developed as a result of
this project.
As make-work projects go this one doesn't spend a lot of money so it is
pretty harmless. But, as GIS professionals let's not get suckered into
taking phantom projects seriously. It is in our interest as a community to
assure that Federal data continues to flow to GIS users, so it is very
important we are not distracted by bureaucratic foolishness in lieu of
serious efforts to make sure that public data continues to be available to
the public. There is no substitute for continuing to pressure recalcitrant
agencies to take simple, inexpensive measures to make the public data they
have available to the public.
If you have any clout with your elected representatives, I'd say tell your
person this is not e-government, it is e-waste, and that a more effective
way of achieving the above goals would be to push all agencies to make their
data holdings available in SDTS on an FTP site somewher
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