Organizing geographic information: The creation of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure

Abstract

Prior to government regulations issued in OMB Circular A-16 in 1990, the organization and dissemination of geospatial data collected by the United States' governments were unregulated and informal. Circular A-16 called for the creation of the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) and charged the FGDC with creating and implementing metadata standards for geospatial data. The importance of geospatial interoperability and metadata standardization between agencies was amplified in 1994 with EO 12906. EO 12906 called for the creation of a National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI). A Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) is the coordination of the creation, collection, dissemination, and storage of spatial data between stakeholders in a spatial data community (Williamson, Rajabifard, and Binns 2005). This study explores the choices made by the FGDC on how to classify geospatial data across agencies and attempts to assess compliance among federal, state, and local governments to metadata standards in the creation of the NSDI.