EOM April 2005 > SHARING IN GEOTECHNOLOGIES

Continued

Take, for example, the recently completed draft and review process for the new national standards developed by the Geospatial One-Stop (GOS) initiative and now being promulgated through the FGDC. Scores of us toiled for a full year to get a set of draft documents describing the seven NSDI themes. We hit the arbitrary completion date of September 30, 2003 — and then the drafts sat for the next nine months before being put out for public comment. (I believe the technical term is "hurry up and wait.") All of 30 people actually read the drafts and submitted comments out of more than 50,000 potential users who were personally invited to participate, according to the Framework Data Standard Status Report.

Figure 3 The FGDC data standards development process

The normal FGDC data standards development is a "12-step process" ( Figure 3). The GOS effort essentially compressed the first seven steps into one by establishing an alternative standards drafting process based on thematic model advisory teams. Since GOS is no longer involved in developing geospatial standards, this work having been returned to the FGDC about a year ago, the normal and protracted process is once again in place.

My claim of irrelevance is not some startling proposal far afield from our experience; it is a report of our past experience. Even we who developed the draft standards don't care to read them. I can't wait to see how many of us care when they go to the International Standards Organization for consideration. Our indifference is our loudest statement.

Having national standards for spatial data exchange sounds like a wonderful thing. At the very least, it's like chicken soup. It can't hurt, right? Well, it can when it keeps you from going to the doctor and getting real help. Are we really any closer to "realizing the NSDI vision" today than we were 10 years ago?

The fundamental flaw with standards is that very few of us do anything in a standard way. The basic problem faced by data sharing entities is making their databases look alike. I say a good pavement condition is 5; you say it is 1. My state conveys property using metes and bounds; your state uses the Public Land Survey System. My street address field has 20 characters; yours has 35. Conceptually, having a national standard provides a universal translator. Make your data look like the standard and you're home free. Only it's not so free to convert your data to a standard, especially when the benefits of doing so flow to others.

We need to stop wasting our collective energies trying to fix the organizational impediments to data exchange through technical standards. We have clung to the standards-setting process like junkies looking for our next fix. But like all drugs, their promises are empty. If the FGDC wants to spend its time doing something useful, how about knocking down the organizational walls that keep federal agencies from actually working with each other. Next, the FGDC could put its energy toward getting federal agencies to work better with state and local governments. Otherwise, the answer to the question posed by the title of this article is, "No, the FGDC is irrelevant." In their current form, the FGDC and its standards have no useful application. I don't need to just exchange generic data. I need these data for this application.

What we need to work on are not data exchange standards, but data exchange reasons that get to the heart of our organizational resistance to data exchange. I have often said that the only people motivated to exchange data are those who don't have any. Give me a good reason why I should expend part of my budget to make it easier for you to do your job. I can think of one reason for me to care about federal data needs: change the meaning of FGDC to Federal Giveaway for Data Collection.

Of course, lowering the cost of data exchange will make it easier to overcome organizational barriers. I would support the FGDC's efforts if they would lower the cost of data exchange, but they won't because they impose an overhead cost to the user. Instead, we need to let the geospatial software industry develop data exchange mechanisms that are essentially invisible to the user, like saving a document in Adobe Acrobat format or importing a shapefile. We need to do more to construct transactional update data sets that can be applied by other agencies to update the portion of our data that they have incorporated into their own. The traditional drop-and-replace approach imposes a big workload on the user, who also has to go through the data to find out what changed since the last version. Wouldn't it be easier for everyone if we just published the stuff that changed? Then folks who might find our data useful could download the edits made since their last update cycle.

If we keep doing the same thing, we will keep getting the same results. Okay, now, everyone repeat after me, "Hi, I'm a standards junkie and I need your help."

About the Author
Al Butler has been actively involved in FGDC-sponsored data standards efforts since the organization was formed, including the recently drafted NSDI data exchange standards. He has worked in the geospatial industry since 1974. He can be reached at: [email protected]

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