Power Panel – The Ties that Bind: GIS Technology for ‘The Greater Good’

by Susan Smith, Editor,
GISCafe & GISWeekly

On March 11, a Power Panel moderated by Matt Ball of Vector 1 Media brought together a number of distinguished professionals to discuss the topic, “GIS Technology for ‘The Greater Good.’”

Panelists included GITA Speaker Award Winner Dr. Bob Austin, the City of Tampa; Ron Langhelm, Booz, Allen & Hamilton; Timothy Nyerges, University of Washington; and Tom Nolan, Seattle Public Utilities.

Ball had encouraged panelists to speak to infrastructure data issues which could potentially include national defense and homeland security, emergency response, data sharing, educating the public, and the physical protection of assets. Within each of these topics, the human aspect of geospatial was to be taken into account. Panelists were then asked to summarize a project or situation in which they or their organization helped use GIS for the greater good.

Austin said the City of Tampa helped Michael Baker, Jr. Inc. working on recovery efforts with FEMA during Hurricane Katrina, and also on recovery work in the manual assessment of damage with Hurricane Charlie. “Just prior to Katrina, we were able to get a sensor over New Orleans to get 163,000 people to qualify for reimbursement, which made life a lot easier for those families to get assistance.”

Langhelm reported that following a number of disasters he was involved—9/11, the space shuttle recovery, and an earthquake—he submitted a paper to FEMA recommending the building of geospatial response teams on a local level. After Hurricane Katrina, FEMA extended funding and the response teams were deployed for the wildfires in California.

Nolan related his experience developing some of the first LiDAR in the country in the development of the Puget Sound Regional LiDAR System. Pioneered by NASA, the effort was a cooperative project with many organizations, including the USGS as a result of its interest in seismic activity and habitat studies.

Nyerges spoke about his work on the National Standards Committee. His PhD advisor was on the chair of the committee for the National Spatial Data Transfer and Nyerges posed the idea of spatial options in the digital world of cartography and GIS. “Computer systems don’t talk to one another very well. We need to look at aspects of how people and computer systems can get together better,” said Nyerges.

“We’re all falling in love with Microsoft,” Langhelm said. “In the old days it was hard to get people to understand technology. Interfaces are much better today; you can drill into other systems for more information than you used to be able to. In our part of the country, people can participate in their own languages in neighborhood meetings.”

Echoing that sentiment, Nyerges said that “Community is understanding the ‘people community’ as well as the geospatial community. As we get into Web-based stuff and what it means to interoperability, there is people interoperability as well.”

This raised some more questions, such as what did people have in mind when they created the databases? If people can’t understand the databases and the data may not be up to date, then they will question the validity of the data, and associate that with the aging infrastructure and then question the usefulness of the GIS.

Sharing information between organizations can be useful when both organizations have something to gain by doing so. In providing data to the public, it’s important to remember that high quality data is not cheap, and there is always software to be maintained. Issues of security are also a priority.

“Being an academic, I’m working on a $20 million proposal for a DataNet, a $100 million program being developed by the National Science Foundation, which is intending to be what the Internet is not now,” said Nyerges. “The Internet doesn’t allow us to share data in a multidisciplinary way. The buzzword here is ‘oncology’ – what is the meaning of your database in the nature of your organization? Organizations have a different intent in building databases.”

Austin recounted a data sharing example, of different departments for the City of Tampa maintaining different address schemes. “The Parks Department didn’t want to use the same address scheme as the rest of the city. A 911 call revealed that the ambulance couldn’t find the location for a particular emergency, and although there was no fatality, it was dramatic enough to get attention to seek ways to share data.”

Data sharing in Tampa evolved in another interesting example: the code enforcing department began finding abandoned buildings. The fire department became excited about this research because they consider abandoned buildings to be more likely to catch fire. The police department wanted to know about the abandoned building locations because they are also known as places where drug deals take place. They realized they had a common need for this data and they began sharing, Austin said.

Langhelm said that for the most part, the tools are evolving as quickly as people can articulate the need for them. The big problem is with data sharing, and making sure your data is out there and available during times of crisis.

A question from the audience precipitated more on data sharing: What happens when people misuse data or don’t understand it? How do you ensure that it’s not misused?

One of the presenters pointed to Google Earth as a prime example of a place where data is mismanaged. “Everyone likes it (Google Earth), but data is mismatched and thrown together, there is image color change even where there are boundaries. It is the epitome of what we’re talking about.”

Disconnected systems offer more opportunities for things to go wrong. A way of tracking data lineage—who created the data and who put their hands on it—would help, and it could be created by software vendors.

“The research world and the commercial world do not know how to get people from one level of knowledge to another,” noted Nyerges. A possible solution is to study what people do with data.

This may involve a “customer care center” where people access data, with a policy in place to find out if they got from the data what they needed. Also helping people learn how to manage data could be useful.