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January / February 2010
Volume 22, Number 1

Traditionaly , clouds are colections of elements pooled together by gravity or need, suspended in the air, visible but penetrable, a ghost-like force of things to come.

But Jack Dangermond uses the term differently. When Dangermond talks clouds, he’s not talking about those residing in the otherwise bright blue skies, but in the virtual world in which data is stored, shared and used. Instead of rain droplets or moisture crystals, his clouds are made of spatial data. Some cover the whole planet, whereas others linger invisibly over just the federal government or a private corporation. Though they exist in another dimension, they have foreseeable real-world benefits. The clouds may hold no consequences for the weather, but they have the potential to impact everything else: where tax dollars are distributed, the planning and development of urban centers, how citizens and governments communicate and solve problems.

Dangermond is the co-founder, president and chief executive officer of the Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI), which is the largest creator of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software in the world.

“There is something we can offer, not only to grow an awareness (of problems) but also to drive efficiency, everywhere from in transportation to how people behave,” Dangermond said during a presentation for the Texas Geographic Information Steering Council. “Geography and geographic knowledge has meaning in that context.”

During an interview with County, Dangermond discussed the past, present and future of Geographic Information System technology, which is currently used for land surveying, mapping and analyzing spatial information.

The geoclouds are futuristic spawns of the Internet that are currently being developed to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, in the hopes of making geographic data and problem-solving methods more widely available. Eventually, there will be public clouds and private clouds, and services that will spring from the orchestration of data within those clouds.

“Agencies and organizations will put some of their content into the cloud,” Dangermond said, adding that the clouds will help put an end to two of the obstacles that have kept GIS technology from being used in rural areas: its significant cost and the amount of hardware and software needed to make it useful. “It’s not a policy issue, it’s an affordability issue. If I can buy storage here, rather than here, at 20 cents on the dollar, I’m going to tend to do that.”

Dangermond said he believes the popularity of “cloud-based computing” — when organizations place their information on the Internet in addition to or rather than housing it internally— will translate to his geoclouds and allow GIS technology to become affordable enough that every agency uses it to organize and share the data they keep on their communities.

“Today all counties I suspect, and if not, most counties, use some kind of financial accounting software to keep their books, but there was a day not too long ago when that wasn’t the case, and there was actually a day in my lifetime when there was no automated account systems at all,” he said, “so I think every department and every agency will come to use a geographic information system just like they use a financial information system, because it’s good record-keeping.”

But the ESRI-designed clouds aren’t the only factor causing prices to drop and usage to soar. Internet tools like Google Earth have helped move development of GIS applications from large, specialized companies to everyday users.

“Because of Google and some of the other free services, these GIS software providers are becoming less proprietary,” said Texas Association of Counties GIS Analyst Bruce Barr. “They have to find where their niche is, because anybody can do it. Anybody can do mapping now and do analysis.”

And that analysis can pertain to a long list of topics. TAC uses the mapping technology to help its property insurance pool evaluate the potential hazards that may befall county properties.

“I can use the location of the property and overlay it against flood zone data and wind models,” Barr said, adding that the information can help county officials make decisions about whether a building or potential site can be used for things like storing evidence or special equipment. “What they used to do only with floods, you can do now with wildfires.”

A Basemap for G-Government
Geographic Information Systems were first developed in the late 1960s, though most larger governments didn’t begin using the technology until the late 1970s or early 1980s. Back then, GIS was a niche mapping technology, used by the planning department or the tax department or the engineering department for a specific purpose. “During the 80s or 90s, that matured… people began to think of it as a cross-cutting technology,” Dangermond said. “People began to think (a common basemap) could be shared among and between the departments, and it would be greatly beneficial.”

Thus the 90s brought on a wave of enterprise systems, where multiple departments began sharing data back and forth to build integrated applications and services. The services were used to drive efficiency by automatically maintaining records, maps and datasets. They were used to improve decision making and planning; by visually analyzing data, localities were able to determine the best location for a new library or fire station. The services also helped government improve its communications to citizens. “People like maps, and they understand situations through mapping that they normally don’t,” Dangermond said, adding that without GIS, where to build a new fire station can result in a political firestorm.

Appraisal departments began using GIS to integrate land use and other environmental factors into their figures; sheriff’s departments use it to track crime; health departments and emergency managers began using GIS as a foundation for providing improved services to their communities. “People typically buy GIS because it helps them do their work. … It’s not something that lives outside of the mission,” Dangermond said. “People don’t buy GIS because it’s cool, they buy GIS because it helps them get their problems solved.”

At the federal level, the National Library of Medicine used GIS to create maps showing where chemicals are released into the air, water and ground. The Centers for Disease Control uses GIS to map human cases of the West Nile Virus. The Recovery.Gov Web site uses GIS to show which areas were awarded grants or contracts. And the 2010 Census will depend on GIS technology to compare the accuracy of the master address list to visible properties.

At the state level, Maryland is leading the way when it comes to finding creative and advanced uses for GIS. Not only does the Maryland Emergency Management Agency use GIS to conduct risk and vulnerability assessments, Gov. Marin O’Malley started BayStat, a statewide tool used to coordinate Chesapeake Bay restoration programs, among other GIS-driven initiatives. His focus on taking data and using it to implement policies and determine priorities earned him a 2009 Public Official of the Year Award from Governing magazine.

In Texas, the Center for Geospatial Technology at Texas Tech University started the Atlas of Rural and Community Health (ARCH). The atlas uses spatial data to compare the land, people and economy of West Texas to the rest of the state in order to “develop a predictive model for community resources required to meet health care needs of the rural elderly in West Texas,” according to its Web site.

Local-level governments, especially rural governments, have been slower to tap into the technology’s potential, mostly due to a lack of resources. But counties have been known to use GIS to organize and visualize appraisal district parcel data, connect citizens with area trails, parks, historical sites and landmarks, or to make ride-share programs more efficient.

Entities have found that regional partnerships and collaboration help make GIS technology more affordable and usable.

For instance, Bexar County’s Information Services division created a GIS Division back in 2005 to “coordinate with the City of San Antonio and other governmental entities for the purposes of developing standards for security, accuracy, maintenance (and) format of GIS data for Bexar County,” according to its Web site, www.bexar. org/IS/GIS.html. The division is a member of a regional geospatial coordination committee of government entities, which shares GIS assets and leverages the GIS buying power of those entities. The effort has allowed elected officials in the county to use the technology in creative ways; for example, Bexar County Clerk Gerard Rickhoff uses the GIS technology to map the area’s foreclosures and tie them to available records and information. Bexar County won a County Best Practices Award from the Texas Association of Counties Leadership Foundation for the foreclosure map. Meanwhile, the City of San Antonio uses the information to give residents visual information about demographics, hydrologic features, political boundaries, zoning and bond project locations, among other things.

“Some places like Bexar County have been early users, and they have really exploited it,” Dangermond said. “The city and the county have collaborated and share data, and do a pretty interesting job.” To make GIS more usable around the state, Barr chairs the Texas Geographic Information Council (TGIC). The TGIC, which is administered by the Texas Department of Information Resources, was founded to help coordinate the development of geographic data and applications at the state level; as chair, Barr is working to spread that coordination further, to county and city governments.

Coordination of GIS data is key. The more spatial information is organized and visualized, the more organizations and agencies can rely on it to help explain challenging problems and plan for the future. “Legislative 9-1-1 reforms pushed GIS technology into counties,” Barr said, adding that only about 40 percent of counties utilize GIS for their parcel data, but almost all counties use GIS to support their 9-1-1 and emergency medical systems.

Gov 2.0
But to Dangermond, all that is just the very beginning of what GIS can do for governments — and not only what GIS can do, but its overall impact on how government functions. “Fundamentally, GIS is not your old man’s jeans anymore,” he said. “We are right on the edge of just a colossal change … a gigantic explosion of new applications.”

Most of what has been done so far has been one-way communication, from government to residents or agency to agency, but that is evolving. The shift in where the data is being kept — online — and by whom it’s being used has lead to a greater amount of interactivity than ever before. Widespread use of the Internet, wireless networks and portable devices has generated a greater public interest in the technology and its potential, and lead to the creation of multi-dimensional communications tools that are based on GIS technology.

“It’s not only an e-government, but I like to call it a g-government initiative. It is connecting, through geography, citizens and their issues — right into the pipeline of government,” Dangermond said. “It will be another step in democracy.”

One example of his g-government comes from the country of Lithuania. “There is only about 3,000,000 people there, but it’s one of the most advanced GIS countries I have ever been in, and one of the applications they have running is a base map on the Web with the ability to have citizens put dots on the map which are showing where all the waste or hazardous or environmentally difficult situations are,” Dangermond said. “The dots on the map for the public are either red or orange or green. The red dots, nobody has done anything yet. The orange dots, some agency accepted it and is fixing it. And the green dots have already been fixed.”

That idea is catching on in the U nited States, too. Several larger cities, such as Pittsburgh, Boston, San Francisco and Washington D.C., allow residents to use their “smart” mobile phones (think iPhones) to snap pictures of blights or other problems —graffiti, potholes, dead trees, broken parking meters —and then send the pictures directly to a government database. Phone applications using Global Positioning Systems (GPS) tie the photographs to their actual locations, and local officials can choose which problems are large enough to fix and which can wait. The applications have already been dubbed as “Gov 2.0.”

Of course, there are downsides that could come with the wave of residential insight. For instance, governments may be tasked with somehow making sure residents understand their resource limitations. They may also have to prioritize the increased list of complaints in a way that doesn’t upset taxpayers. (The Washington D.C. service theoretically allows residents to “vote” on the complaints.)

Many GIS-based applications available in those cities and others weren’t created by the governments themselves, but by techies or tech companies that find the data on the Internet and use it to create applications, which they sometimes sell to users and sometimes offer for free.

One tool that has gained national media exposure is SeeClickFix, which offers “free tools for governing”; residents can post their concerns online, complete with geographic coordinates, and government entities can sign up to receive notifications whenever a concern is filed about something in their geographic zone. Complaints are “open” if no action has been taken and “closed” if an agency has responded. The downside is that if residents live in areas where local government agencies or 3-1-1 centers do not watch the site, they can still file complaints and comment on other’s complaints, but there’s no mechanism in place for ensuring the service request gets to the corresponding agency.

Plano is one of the cities featured on the site. On Sunday, Jan. 3, two residents wanted the northbound lane at 1640 Woodburn Corners fixed; the pavement there was “seriously cracked.” The lane is reportedly often used by cyclists.

“The cracks are enough to crash a bicycle!” wrote the resident who submitted the complaint. The next morning, the City of Plano responded.

“This issue has been reported to the City of Plano Public Works Department. They have issued a service request,” the city commented. “Thanks for reporting this.”