|
Description:
The Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) is an interagency committee organized in 1990 to promote the coordinated dissemination and application of geospatial data through development of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI). In cooperation with governmental, academic, nonprofit and private sector organizations, the FGDC is developing the NSDI as a base structure of policies, standards, procedures and relationships among data producers and users that will leverage individual geographic data efforts, and thereby facilitate expedited and expanded sharing, access, and use of geospatial data. The NSDI will (1) reduce duplication of effort among agencies, (2) improve quality and reduce costs related to geographic information, (3) make geographic data more available to the public, (4) increase the benefits of using available data, and (4) establish key partnerships with states, counties, cities, tribal nations, academia and the private sector to increase data availability. The Geospatial Data Clearinghouse (i.e., the National Spatial Data Clearinghouse) is a collection of over 250 servers having digital geographic data primarily for use in Geographic Information Systems (GIS), image processing systems, and other modeling software and prepared in accordance with NSDI protocols. While facilitated by the FGDC, the Clearinghouse is cooperative and decentralized, having six regional gateways. From the FGDC site, one can search the Clearinghouse gateways, browse the organizational sites of the registered NSDI Clearinghouse Nodes, download papers pertaining to the metadata, standards, framework, and stakeholders associated with development of the NSDI, or search through the partner site of the Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies (CAST) for online geospatial data by general subject, state GIS and base map sources, or other U.S. organizational sites hosting national scale data. |
|
Resource Comments