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Article Excerpt
Introduction
American national government policies that support much of the fundamental research questions and practical applications of geographic information science (GIScience) and geographic information systems (GIS) remain a confusing amalgam of deliberative, incremental, and in some cases, accidental public choices. Directing these choices are a half century of public and private initiatives to encourage government efficiency, along with substantial economic development for both civil and military science/technology research programs. By the late 1990s, because of the rapid diffusion of powerful information technologies throughout American society, GIScience and GIS would become essential elements in American public policy structure. Indeed, since the Second World War, U.S. government information policy, through the increasingly sophisticated technologies deployed by different federal agencies (see Table 1), led to many novel techniques on how to model or visualize geographic data. Both private and public researchers used these technological breakthroughs in geospatial analysis to examine ways American society could grapple with complex problems in the area of health, economics, national security, natural disasters, among other pressing public needs. The fruits of this public investment and research began to involve many of the vexing problems inherent in national public decision making across uncertain cultural, physical, political, or economic conditions. Rather than distinguishing between GIScience and GIS, this paper merges the public use of these academic perspectives into the collective term of "spatial information policies." With a much finer sense of understanding how these human and natural events played out through time and space, GIScience and GIS enjoy separate (but significantly related) intellectual traditions drawn from a number of academic disciplines. However, when one thinks about each in the context of federal government policy over the last fifty years, it is easier to focus on a shared emphasis to explain "reality" within a measurable spatial context, as well as resolve practical problems.
Another aspect of American spatial information policy evolution can be considered through the dynamic interplay between private and public investments in information economies. The first stems from the federal government's decades-long initiative to create the World Wide Web and its diffusion throughout all aspects of American social, political, and economic life. The second is the rapid expansion and interoperability of vast amounts of digital data gleaned from remote sensing technologies since the late 1970s, leading to the necessary creation of industry--and government-wide standards/protocols to share these data. The third was the creation of national research agendas, along with funding opportunities, by national research institutes to explore theoretical possibilities and applications of GIScience. Much of this basic research work sought to "ground" theoretical spatial research in a way to solve very practical ways in how this kind of scientific analysis could help authorities deal with large-scale problems in land management, environmental protection or restoration, scarce resource allocation, recovery from natural disasters, and long-term reallocation of public benefits, as well as the technological demands of supporting a global military infrastructure.
As this scientific and technological revolution took place, something comparable unfolded within public organizations as they approached the management and allocation of data and knowledge resources to address complicated national issues. During the mid-1970s, public policy makers embraced the fundamentals of information resource management (IRM) and used its principles to guide the purpose and direction of several critical regulatory decisions that would have a direct impact on public spatial information policies. Just as expanding computing power and technology gave geographers and cartographers critical perspectives on the use of geographic data in some surprising new ways, the concepts of IRM promised the possibility of coordinating federal agency goals and budgets towards demonstrable (i.e., measurable) outcomes based on an agreed value and purpose of the data gathered. Although the use of these principles encouraged this type of rational approach to policy planning, much of the federal government's spatial information policy would continue to be hampered by a lack of coordination among many unrelated GIScience and GIS programs directed by dozens of federal agencies.
A final aspect that profoundly shaped the relative success, or failure, of federal spatial information policy during this time period grew from the deep-seated tensions between civilian and military authorities over their shared responsibilities for the government's geographic and cartographic missions. Prior to the early 1960s, federal spatial information policy sought to bring order among the myriad aspects of traditional public cartography and geodesy to fashion a "national map program" held to acceptable standards and understood by the multitude of private and public agencies responsible for a vast number of information sources (elevations, roads, human settlements, etc.) Beyond these common technical concerns, however, civilian and military authorities often worked independently--establishing many cartographic and map programs deemed by government auditors to be duplicative, wasteful, or badly implemented. This paper places the development of American spatial information policies within this larger context of political, technological, and economic development.
1965 to 1980: War and Technological Breakthroughs
The concepts of GIScience and GIS, as understood today, were largely expressed within the 19th century concepts of cartography, geodesy, engineering, and public management for much of the first 170 years of national government in the United States. By the mid-1940s, drawing from the success and experience of its second global war, the federal government's information technology implementation and public administration capacity would evolve enough to take the first steps towards effective cooperation among the nearly forty different federal agencies responsible for federal government cartography and spatial knowledge. The early 1950s, however, still found much of the federal bureaucracy's mapping and cartography missions dedicated towards:
* The survey, management, and disposal of public land;
* The creation of limited cadastre and land records keeping designed to support broad policies of national, regional, and local economic development;
* The protection of national borders and public safety; and
* The gathering of information from foreign intelligence and from international conflicts.
For example, the Department of Interior's Bureau of Land Management and Geological Survey and the Department of Agriculture's Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, as well as the various armed services and the Coast and Geodetic Survey, among others, cooperated and competed for limited attention and resources. Together, these agencies measured, plotted, surveyed, mapped, and protected the Nation's landscape, coasts, rivers, and interests overseas. Much of the technical aspects of this work lacked any centralization and research. Some production facilities, such as those managed by the U.S. Geological Survey, were huge industrial printing and production facilities. Others, such as those associated with the military services, were smaller in size and more focused on the tactical needs of the armed forces, rather than the larger strategic national issues they might share with civilian agencies. Some standards and common data elements clearly were used among the different bureaus, especially since many came to accept the U.S. Geological Survey's various topographic series as base maps for their own programs and missions. The Bureau of the Budget (renamed the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in the early 1970s) issued its Circular No. A-16 in 1953 (OMB 1990). This policy document, over the next 40 years, became the key conceptual building block for much of America's federal geospatial policy. Specifically, it is the...
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