NSGIC Committee Pages

New CLC Faces

2011-02-23T14:41:00.002-05:00

The Corporate Leadership Council (CLC) promotes the line of communication between NSGIC and our corporate sponsors. It consists of one representative from each of our Gold and Platinum sponsors. This helps us forge a partnership where we can have an open exchange of feedback and ideas in order to continue to move forward and grow.

This year HP, MapQuest and TomTom joined the CLC family at the Gold Package level. Other Gold sponsors include Bentley, ESRI, Michael Baker Jr. Inc., NAVTEQ, and Surdex. In addition, North West Group, Northrop Grumman and Sanborn continue to sponsor at the Platinum Package level.

Communications Committee Report: A New Approach to Committee Pages

2011-02-23T13:24:00.000-05:00

The NSGIC Communications Committee has proposed a new approach to committee pages for NSGIC. This approach involves using blogging tools to help committees organize and report their work. You are looking at the prototype now.

At its January meeting, the Communications Committee approved a proposed new approach and asked that it be presented to the Board of Directors. The Board reacted favorably at its January meeting and the Communications Committee planned a path forward at its February meeting.

As a first step, this NSGIC Committee Pages site has been set up, using Blogger. We'll work with each committee chair to get them signed-up and see if we can't get them using the site.

About NSGIC

2011-01-07T08:57:00.000-05:00

The National States Geographic Information Council (NSGIC) is an organization committed to efficient and effective government through the prudent adoption of geospatial information technologies (GIT). Members of NSGIC include senior state geographic information system (GIS) managers and coordinators. Other members include representatives from federal agencies, local government, the private sector, academia and other professional organizations. A rich and diverse group, the NSGIC membership includes nationally and internationally recognized experts in geospatial information technologies, data creation and management as well as information technology policy.

Goals
NSGIC provides a unified voice on geographic information and technology issues, advocates State interests, and supports its membership in their statewide initiatives. The Council actively promotes prudent geospatial information integration and systems development. NSGIC reviews legislative and agency actions, promotes positive legislative actions, and provides advice to public and private decision-makers. NSGIC members are actively involved in the coordination and application of geospatial technologies in their States. They are often at the forefront of GIS and information technology innovation. Many are top-level managers who recommend specific hardware and software purchases or define GIS procurement policies for their jurisdiction. These State GIS coordinators exert a great deal of influence on geospatial policies and resource development in their States.

Concerns
NSGIC is particularly concerned with creation of intelligent maps and databases that enable public and private decision makers to make better informed and timelier decisions in a wide array of governmental areas. NSGIC also supports the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) as the technology, policies, criteria, standards and people necessary to promote geospatial data sharing throughout all levels of government, the private and non-profit sectors, and the academia. Geospatial technology can affect such diverse areas as:

Homeland Security
Emergency management and emergency response
Economic development
Health and human services
Environmental protection and management
Facilities management
Parcel appraisal and assessment
Education
Transportation Planning
Natural resource management

A Common Thread
The implications of GIS technology and data are profound. Location is the single thread that is common to all data. In the not-too-distant future, nearly every governmental unit will adopt geographic or location-based database schemes to tie governmental information systems together for improved data administration. Simply put, GIS can enhance the usefulness of data and return on investment in public information. NSGIC advocates the benefits of geospatial technologies and data that can only be realized through intergovernmental and private sector cooperation, coordination, collaboration and partnerships.
Benefits of NSGIC Membership

Communications: Members are eligible to participate in NSGIC's Member and State Representative Listservs. All members are listed in NSGIC's membership directory (updated annually), and receive a complimentary copy.

Partner & Liaison Opportunities: NSGIC members participate in liaisons between The Council and more than two dozen agencies and partners.

Conferences: The hallmark events of the NSGIC calendar year are the two conferences which bring members, sponsors and partners together to address issues and opportunities. NSGIC holds a Spring Midyear Conference in the Washington, DC area focused on federal government activities; and a Fall Annual Conference in a host state focused on state and local activities of NSGIC members.

State Coordination: NSGIC assists member states in strengthening their coordination programs through its States Coordination Model. Annual surveys are conducted among all 50 states to summarize activities and share data.

Policy Development: NSGIC is increasingly recognized for its contributions toward the development of national geospatial policy. NSGIC members have been requested to participate in many committees and the input is highly valued. NSGIC seeks to make sure the needs and concerns of its member states continue to be heard and addressed at the national policy level. As a unified body, NSGIC can better serve as one voice for all states.

Peer-to-Peer Monitoring and Outreach: NSGIC members provide valuable information and experiences to their peers across state lines on topics as diverse as standards development, job classifications, proposal development, and many other issues.

For more information on membership, sponsorship or partnership opportunities, visit our website at www.nsgic.org or contact Diane Schafer, Director of Meetings & Members Services, at (443) 640-1075 or diane@ksgroup.org.

A GIS Calendar

2011-01-01T14:09:00.000-05:00

Facts About NSGIC Sponsorships

2010-12-30T14:13:00.000-05:00

As the popularity of spatial technology grows, it offers new challenges and opportunities to GIS professionals. Advances in the geospatial industry now provide tools and information to help solve complex problems in society. However, more data, more software, more users, and more government programs that promote or rely on the technology presents state professionals with complicated new issues. The National States Geographic Information Council (NSGIC) is extremely helpful in addressing the myriad of issues associated with statewide GIS initiatives.

The National States Geographic Information Council (NSGIC) is one place where state Geographic Information System (GIS) professionals go to elevate issues, discuss the alternatives and define solutions surrounding GIS and GIS implementation. NSGIC is a small but influential group of GIS leaders representing the interests of the states providing value to our members, sponsors and partners in supporting our goals and our objectives.

We are a fairly exclusive organization dedicated to the coordination of spatial initiatives and focused on strategies for collaboration. NSGIC was created as a forum to exchange information and develop consensus on issues impacting the states. NSGIC consists of 50 state coordinators and approximately 75 state officials, sponsors and partners. The strength of NSGIC is our ability to speak as a single voice, representing the best interests of our member states as well as our ability to communicate effectively and efficiently to 1) the NSGIC membership, 2) our existing sponsors, partners and collaborators, and 3) our potential partners and collaborators. It is through this communication that NSGIC creates and provides a mechanism for coordination and collaboration.

NSGIC provides a mechanism for facilitated discussion and interaction on issues impacting state government within the membership. Our sponsors play a significant part in discussions and with assisting in the resolution of issues. NSGIC also interacts with other national organizations such as the National Associations of Counties (NACO), National Governors Association (NGA) and the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) and look for ways to complement each other and our efforts.

NSGIC has two major gatherings a year – our Mid-Year Meeting and our Annual Conference. The NSGIC Mid-Year Meeting is held in March or April and our Annual Conference is held in September. Participating in NSGIC events exposes our sponsors to an exclusive group of state directors and coordinators dealing with policies, standards, statewide GIS initiatives and developing partnerships with federal agencies, local government and ultimately firms to advance the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI).

NSGIC sponsorship provides a sense of the spatial pulse of the nation. It allows our sponsors to stay in touch and in tune with the needs, concerns and issues impacting states and all levels of government. It allows our sponsors to participate in discussions on issues and obtain a full and enriched view on issues and their potential impacts. NSGIC sponsorship provides a vehicle for bi-directional communication, the facilitation of issues and the opportunity to access this progressive state GIS community.

There are significant long-term benefits to NSGIC sponsorship. Our state coordinators are key contacts for understanding their states' major GIS issues. Our members are in decision-making positions and are recognized leaders within the spatial community of their respective states. In speaking and conveying a sponsors' message to them, you are in effect speaking to their state council or coordinating body and the spatial community within their respective states. This allows our sponsors to effectively "get the word out" on new technologies and ideas. Our sponsors stay ahead of the game regarding what they have to offer and what will impact the states.

Please take a moment to review the information about NSGIC sponsorship levels and associated benefits. The benefits of NSGIC sponsorship are far reaching and will position your firm to be more proactive to the needs of state government and statewide GIS activities. We look forward to hearing from you regarding your interest in NSGIC membership and sponsorship in the very near future. Should you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact any of our NSGIC Officers or Board Members for assistance. Thanks again for your consideration and we hope to hear from you soon.

NSGIC Knowledge Base: Parcel Integration Strategies

2010-12-30T13:32:00.001-05:00

Idaho GIS Coordinator posted a question on the NSGIC State Caucus Listserv seeking methods and experiences to incorporate public land geometries and attributes, or attributes alone, into a single, statewide parcel layer built from contributions from a variety of sources. The following is a summary of responses.

Idaho

In Idaho, my office is responsible for the state lands spatial database. We began with county parcel geometry and added more specific owner info and other attributes. Then we asked each county if we could reconcile our records with theirs; most counties consented. We found and fixed nearly 70 errors. Thus, for statewide parcels, state lands are already in sync with the county geometries, but only some of them incorporated our more specific owner name into their databases. Many public land areas in county databases do not have parcel IDs to enable a join. We are farther from a solution for federal lands, as each fed agency may or may not have a well-developed land records unit, and most counties do not have the resources to elaborate on public land polygons.

New Jersey
In NJ we don't have quite that problem, but one similar. We have a regional authority that has partial jurisdiction over the towns in two of our counties. We're accomplishing that blending of information from different sources by tagging the records by jurisdiction, and when an update from one jurisdiction comes to us, we delete the old records of theirs and load the new ones. But ... this only works because we went through and edge-matched everything along all of the boundaries, and got everyone to agree to use that version for any subsequent maintenance. (Initially we were waiting for the regional authority to give their data to the counties, and collecting whole counties from the county government after they merged the changes. It didn't take us long to see that this wasn't going to work because the county staff were backlogged.)

Indiana
We don’t have much federal land in Indiana. We do have our share of state owned land. The geometry of state owned land and minimal attribution (think state parcel i.d.) are maintained at the county level. We have a group within state government that maintains much more attribution for state-owned land; the geometry comes from the counties. We are only including minimal attribution of the statewide data. In the case of parcels, we are publishing only the geometry plus the statewide parcel ID plus a local ID if one exists. We think this will be enough to facilitate a join with any number of other data sets owned by a user.

New Mexico
New Mexico’s status regarding a statewide parcel dataset is very similar to Idaho’s. Much of what you describe applies, almost verbatim, to New Mexico. Bottom line here is county assessors currently have little motivation or business need driving them to enhance their current workflows to include collecting and maintaining data on land other than the real property they appraise. Regarding state assessed lands/property, although assessors are evaluated by our Property Tax Division on their effectiveness in assigning PIN’s (UPC’s here) to these areas, this is not practiced consistently in all thirty-three counties.

Over the past few years we’ve been fortunate to have worked closely with the FGDC Subcommittee for Cadastral Data, specifically their Wildland Fire Project. Two of the more significant products of this partnership have been the development and publication of the New Mexico CadNSDI (standardized PLSS built from GCDB) and, with the parcels we’ve been able to collect from about two thirds of our counties, the ability to load data into the NSDI Core Parcel feature class in the CadNSDI. See attached screenshot. This is Bernalillo County (mostly Albuquerque) parcels loaded into the NM CadNSDI. You can see the parcel ID’d and selected and the attributes indicating “Owner Classification or Type” and “Full Owner Name.”

In the case of federal and state lands, the above story currently only works for counties that are populating those fields. Not true for most of our counties. The long-term goal is to help/encourage all of our counties to publish data (GIS parcels and attributes, together or separately with respective joining fields) that conforms to the attached draft standard and systematically load these into the Core Parcel feature class. The standard integrates recommendations from both our State’s parcel mapping manual and the CadNSDI.

Washington
The Department of Ecology took all the parcels data and by county they did a dissolve on the land use code (which for WA is incorporated in the parcels data). From there they added in the major ownership information (USFS, BLM, Parks etc). They hand entered in the land use information for the three counties that don’t have county parcels data. The result was a detailed statewide land use data set with major ownership in it.

This is Another Test Post

2010-12-28T15:36:00.002-05:00

Small area data is now available from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey. A New York Times website provides instant mapping capability, nationwide for 22 demographic and housing variables. The site is called Mapping America. It is incredibly fast and easy to use.

Some features:

Pick area to map by city or zip code
Mix of dot maps and shaded/choropleth
Major themes are Race and Ethnicity, Income, Housing and Families, and Education.
Dots represent different numbers of people depending on scale
Pan and zoom
Rollover to see actual numbers for a tract or county, depending on mapping scale
Viewers are encouraged to submit their insights via Twitter or Facebook
Times readers can submit their own maps (46 have as of today)

This is a Test Post

2010-12-28T11:03:00.003-05:00

The FGDC recently released the “Modernization Roadmap for the Geospatial Platform”. They are accepting comments on this document through the Ideascale application that was used for feedback on data.gov and via email to geoplatformcomments@fgdc.gov.

NSGIC has submitted recommendations on Ideascale and additional comments to the FGDC directly. We have a long commitment to building a spatial data infrastructure for the nation. Our comments on the Platform reflect our concern that after many years, progress on such an infrastructure has been disappointing. In fact, we are not alone in this assessment. We think there are some significant systemic issues that still need to be addressed including funding, authority, and technical capacity. We also think the Geospatial Platform needs strategic and business plans (using the guidelines developed for the Fifty States Initiative), and lacks a governance process for a truly national (not just a federal) platform.

There are several examples among federal programs of successful local-state-federal collaboration and data sharing. These present great opportunities for building incrementally toward the objectives of the Platform. Our comments list some of these programs. These examples show that states have been successful in building required data and developing the necessary infrastructure with support and guidance from the federal government. The Platform should recognize this and support burgeoning or mature state infrastructures. NSGIC, of course, considers that a primary goal as an organization is to support them.

Please go to Ideascale and read our comments; vote for the ideas that you agree with and consider adding your comments. The Geospatial Platform is an important effort. States should work to ensure that it contributes to a functional National Spatial Data Infrastructure that meets their business requirements. All comments are due by the end of the year. You can also read our more extensive comments here.