Opening remarks, Max Ethridge, Chief, Mid-Continent Mapping Center

Welcome to Rolla and MCMC

On behalf of the National Mapping Division and Mid-Continent Mapping Center, I welcome you all to Rolla, Missouri. The organizers tell me that this is to be a workshop--the operative word being "work" and so they chose Rolla as the site, knowing that you could do little else while you were here.

That is not entirely true, you can visit our Mapping Center, and I encourage you to take advantage of the tours we have arranged. MCMC is one of five field Centers located across the United States, responsible for seeing to the geographic and cartographic data requirements of our nation.

Our Changing Mission

Once, the National Mapping Division alone produced the greater part of the Nation's cartographic products. But with the advent of Geographic Information Systems came an amazing proliferation of governmental agencies and private concerns capable of collecting earth science information. These spatial data producers feed a seemingly insatiable national appetite for information about our lands and our national resources. Information abounds; so the USGS need not produce data so much as manage information.

In fact our new strategic action is this:

Expand and redefine the USGS from principal producer of primary geographic and cartographic data to collaborator with primary responsibility for coordination, setting of data standards, long-term storage and management of data, and development of interpretive methods, both nationally and internationally.

A good picture of NMD's evolution is this:

DATA COLLECTION THEN--Field surveys and photogrammetry

DATA COLLECTION NOW--Digital processes

DATA COLLECTION FUTURE--Data Integration; multiple sources

All this means is that we find ways to locate and share geographic information, a mission given legal mandate by Executive Order 12906 calling for a National Spatial Data Infrastructure.

What MCMC is doing

This does not mean that we have abandoned our commitment to National Mapping Program Products. I encourage you to visit our Center, and we can tell you more about these products;

Maps, Raster Graphics, Digital Line Graphs, Digital Elevation Models, Aerial Photography, Digital Orthophoto Quads, Satellite Imagery, and Land Cover Characterization.

We also have an active Data Applications program with an emphasis on developing GIS themes for environmental impact studies. There is much to look at our Center, most I am sure, would be of considerable interest to this group.

But What of Standards (internal to national stage)

But this Workshop is not about Products, it is about standards; specifically a national data exchange standard. In 1980, the USGS was designated the lead agency in developing earth science data standards for the federal government. Now, more than ever The National Mapping Division is concerned with standards. We take our leadership role seriously and believe strongly--particularly now that we are integrators, not just producers of information--that standards are essential. Standards ensure consistency and usability, and inasmuch as can be done in a complex and ever-changing world of information exchange, they make things predictable.

Certainly information and products must be described--quantitative measurements understood and applied. And--apropos to this meeting--data must be interchangeable. If this much touted information age is to me our servant rather than our master, we must be able to exchange and access data readily.

We are coming to realize that standards must be inclusive and responsive to the gamut of data applications. As the presentation model and medium of earth science data changes (from paper map to features stored as bytes in database) so must standards. Obviously rules of collecting and depicting information for maps cannot also govern digital files. And even with digital data, model, format, and intended use simply defy rigid and simple rule setting. Standards cannot be technology bound or process bound, and they must not be internalized. NMD's standards must harmonize with those set by national and international standards organizations.

A glimpse of NMD's Standard Program, then-now-and future would look like this:

STANDARDS THEN: Internal Technical Specifications (a finite set of products and a standard for each)

STANDARDS NOW: National Standards such as FGDC and ANSI; exchange standards such as SDTS, base cartographic standards, and standards for Geographic Information

Systems

STANDARDS FUTURE: Data integration, International, and OpenGIS standards

The National Mapping Division Strategic Plan sets forth these goals:

Provide leadership and technical expertise to assist in developing FGDC standards

Change the NMD's focus on standards from primarily internal product specifications to national and international standards.

Promote standards activities, both within and outside the bureau, as a significant aspect of the NMD's mission.

Enhance standards coordination activities among Federal, State, local, and other geospatial data producer, in part by developing network among field offices to gather input to standard development activities.

What's most important

Increasing emphasis will be given to providing information about and access to digital geospatial data through the USGS node of the National Geospatial Data Clearinghouse.

Suppose we create a National Spatial Data Infrastructure with tentacles reaching far into and throughout the GIS community so that we can find most of the Nation's geospatial data; and we establish a Clearinghouse for that data--a network of geographic information nodes, easily accessed for quick data discovery. The USGS and other Federal data producers will be the data stewards for specific themes of data. Is any of this of much value if the information cannot be shared? if it cannot be transferred or moved without loss of content and structure. It is only slightly overstated to say that the kingpin of the NSDI, for now at least, is a data exchange standard.

The Spatial Data Transfer Standard is a Federal Information Processing Standard and has been adopted by the FGDC as the National Spatial Data Infrastructure data exchange format. It has been embraced by some Federal data producers (most noticeably, USGS), and next month will be introduced as a national standard to ANSI.

Implementation is difficult

But the task of implementing the standard is proving onerous. Many reasons have been cited as impediments to acceptance--complexity, expense (it is after all an unfunded mandate driving compliance), and to some degree competing standards. There is also a the general antipathy that some feel toward any standard.

To set the tone of this workshop, let me say that the complaint of complexity is legitimate but not reason enough to abandon the effort. Any model and system-independent standard will be complex. But the complexity can be made invisible to GIS users. Much of the complexity can be solved by application toolkits, advance translators and the right profile. The expense is justified if the result is interchangeable datasets. The competing standards issue can be solved in large measure by efforts toward harmonization, or identifying properly the role of SDTS. Antipathy toward standards must simply be ignored.

In 1992 the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology approved SDTS as a Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS 173) and named the USGS as the maintenance authority.

Our Bureau Policy states:

The USGS will provide digital spatial data to the public in the appropriate SDTS profile,

at a minimum.

And our Division Policy states:

The SDTS (FIPS 173) is the public distribution format for all NMD digital geospatial data offerings, and shall be the exclusive public distribution form for all newly defined geospatial data offerings. (Exceptions can be made for data models not supported by the SDTS, and certainly we can make special arrangements with data partners)

There is good reason for these policies--the USGS and other Federal data producers disseminate large volumes of geospatial data to a diverse customer base. We want our data accessible by all. Much of it is now available in SDTS, and more is on the way. The FGDC, the USGS, and the entire GIS community have great expectations for the SDTS, but in the face of implementation problems enthusiasm is beginning to wane. There is a reticence on the part of some Federal Agencies to implement and so, being unsure of our commitment to SDTS, a lukewarm effort from the commercial sector to introduce translation software--will there be a market for our translators if data producers ignore SDTS. We have problems to solve and this workshop is designed to help. The workshop objectives are these:

To expedite the implementation of SDTS among Federal spatial data producers

(data producers must not be reluctant to distribute data in SDTS)

To encourage the development and increase the availability of SDTS application software

(SDTS data must be usable and the complexity of transfer unknown to data user)

To determine the future role of SDTS

(where does it fit in a world of feature transactions and OpenGIS)

We are not here this week to promote SDTS, but we are hopeful that we can solve some implementation problems and assuage the fears of data producers that now think that SDTS files are too difficult to create and too difficult for their customers to decode. We are here also to reconfirm, before the vendor community, our intent to continue offering SDTS data set--lots of them. And we may be here to redefine SDTS' niche in data exchange--is it a stepping stone to OpenGIS, and will it become an archive standard once OpenGIS emerges. But mostly we are here for most basic of reasons--to solve the problems facing producers and users of the SDTS format...how can we make SDTS easier to use.