The last time I attended a URISA Annual Conference was in 2007 in Washington DC when Dave McIlhagga and I gave what I think was the first talk at a URISA conference on open source geospatial technology.  I think we titled it Open Source Geospatial: An Alternative Business Model for Municipal Governments. 

The last few years have been a challenging time for many non-vendor geospatial conferences and I was interested in seeing how URISA’s annual event has evolved. 

Open Source Geospatial and Open Data

The first thing I noticed was that there were several sessions on open source geospatial technology. I attended one by Sara Yurman, who gave an overview of open source technology mentioning PostGIS, MapServer, MapGuide, GeoServer, and OpenJump.  Tomorrow there are two other open source geospatial presentations from Pennsylvania State and Rutgers.  There was also a session on open data presented by Thea Clay, a member of OpenStreetMap, that engendered a very lively discussion of how OpenStreetMap data might be used by 911 services.

Challenges Facing the Geospatial Industry

In the opening session this morning, representatives of local URISA chapters were asked to report the three most important issues being faced my members of their chapters.  About fifteen chapter representatives presented their top three issues.  I jotted down a few that seemed to be repeated by a number of the representatives.

• Data quality
• Training
• Managers’ lack of awareness about geospatial technology
• Aging workforce in the geospatial industry
• Lack of entry level jobs in the geospatial industry
• Difficulty in sharing data within government and between different levels of government
• Funding and lack of resources
• Breaking down silos and integrating geospatial with other application domains

Geospatial Challenges at the EPA

Stan Meiburg of the EPA gave the keynote and focussed on discussing what’s getting in the way of making geospatial more useful at the EPA.

1. Technical obstacles

• Paper reporting – Many environmental reports are still submitted on paper
• Legacy databases – Developed before the era of modern computing, the EPA maintains the second largest database in the US government (the largest is the database maintained by the IRS), but it relies on legacy technology and needs to be reimplemented using modern computing technology.

2. Data quality

• A major challenge is keeping data current.  Business processes need to be focussed on maintaining data currency.

3. Laws and regulations

• Most of the laws and regulations that the EPA is responsible for enforcing were passed and promulgated in the period 1969 to 1990, before the revolution that made massive computing power affordable, and need to be modernized.  But this is difficult to do in the current heavily polarized political environment.

4. Competing policy objectives

• Transparency vs confidentiality – the EPA would like to be more transparent, but legal issues and issues of economic interest, for example, BP’s obligations to cover the costs of cleaning up after the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, makes this a challenge

5. Public committment

• What do we need to know and what are we willing to pay for it ?  Maintaining data costs money, and like in many other sectors, we need to think not just about how much it costs to collect data in the first place, but how much it costs to maintain data.  The EPA spends a considerable proportion of its budget on maintaining databases.  For example, it is responsible for monitoring over a million point pollution sources.  Wastewater management is an important area that the EPA has responsibility for monitoring, but one of the fundamental geospatial data challenges is that in many oommunities we don’t know where our storm, sanitary and combined sewers are (and not just sewers, but much of our underground facilities.)

He concluded by suggesting that aggressive environmental standards in the US are good for US business, citing emission standards for automobiles as a positive example where domestic standards drove US world technology leadership.  He suggested that clean energy is a negative example, where other countries have been more aggressive in developing clean energy technology and are now leading the world’s efforts in this area.