In October of this year, the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC), a committee with members from the executive branch of the United States government chaired by the secretary of the Department of the Interior, released their National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) Strategic Plan. The plan, entitled Building the Geospatial Future Together, covers the years 2025-2035 and is a 16-page document that can be found here. It has been 30 years since the first NSDI Strategic Plan, put in place in 1994 under Bill Clinton’s administration, and the wide-ranging document outlines many elements related to spatial data in the United States.
Overall, the FGDC says the plan “is a national plan involving the broad participation of Federal, State, Tribal, and local governments and the private sector, including private industry, academic institutions, and nonprofit organizations,” and that it “establishes a vision for the NSDI that will enable it to address the evolving challenges and opportunities in the realm of geospatial data collection or acquisition, management, and use.”
One of the big themes, however, is the growing prevalence and importance of open data in this realm, both data owned by the government and free for use by anyone, or perhaps even more importantly data collected and distributed by private companies. Recently, Geo Week News spoke with Marc Prioleau, Executive Director of the Overture Maps Foundation, about the importance of open data being a major part of this conversation.
It’s important for this conversation to think about how much has changed since that initial NSDI Strategic Plan 30 years ago, which in some sense, says Prioleau, is “kind of everything.” More prudent to this conversation, however, are two specific changes. One, in Prioleau’s words, is that there is now a “widespread corporate interest” in mapping, which he attributes to the rise of mobile services.
"All of a sudden with mobile services, we’re all moving around. It turns out that a lot of information we want is relevant to where we are at that moment, and maps have just kind of gone with that.”
Additionally, he points to the growth around open data, and looks at 20 years ago being a big turning point in both respects as we are coming up on the 20th anniversary of the launch of Google Maps, while having just recently passed the 20th anniversary of OpenStreetMap’s launch. Today, Prioleau sees a convergence between the corporate interest in maps as well as the influx of open data. This ties back to a conversation Geo Week News had with Mike Harrell, SVP of Engineering Maps with TomTom, in which he noted that companies long tried building their own maps before realizing that it was much more difficult than they may have initially believed.
All of this helped lead to the creation of Overture Maps Foundation, which includes some of the world’s largest companies including Meta, Microsoft, AWS, TomTom, Esri, and more. The FGDC points out this trend directly in the report, saying:
"There is a growing emphasis on open data initiatives and collaboration among government agencies and the private sector, including private industry, academic institutions, and nonprofit organizations. Open data policies and platforms will promote transparency, innovation, and knowledge sharing, and collaborative partnerships will foster the development of integrated solutions to address complex societal challenges.”
Prioleau tells Geo Week News that it’s important for open data that is being created by these private companies not to go to waste in this government plan.
"Don’t leave out open data, because it’s now become a thing and is getting a lot of resources,” Prioleau said. “These companies are, in large part, funding open data creation and maintenance because they need it for their operations. So, all of a sudden you have a new type of public-private partnership where the private part is actually doing this stuff already.”
There are a few complications for why the government might not be as enthusiastic about open data as one might initially think, with perhaps the most important being the distinction between accurate data and authoritative data. While they often overlap, they aren’t quite the same thing, and really the government is the only entity that can produce truly authoritative spatial data, which is to say data that would hold up in court. Private companies are reliant on accurate data, but it’s not necessarily the same authoritative data that governments would need.
That being said, Prioleau notes that it’s not an insurmountable obstacle and that there are indeed ways for governments to use open data and spatially join the open data set with their authoritative data "in a way that supports those use cases.”
Overall, it seems that the FDGC is indeed acknowledging the value of this open data within the report, and that this growing trend will be part of the national strategic plan over the next decade. For Prioleau, that’s a breath of fresh air.
"There’s going to be a tremendous effort from some very large companies with very sophisticated resources for AI, a lot of consumer endpoints, and they’re going to be working on not just building mapping data, but open mapping data,” he said. “At some level, that should be a foundation of any spatial data infrastructure, because open means shared and that it’s a shared resource, and it means that there’s something that hopefully we can all agree on that other pieces plug into.”
