Internet access and use of georeferenced public health information for GIS application will be an important and exciting development for the nation's Department of Health and Human Services and other ...health agencies in this new millennium. Technological progress toward public health geospatial data integration, analysis, and visualization of space-time events using the Web portends eventual robust use of GIS by public health and other sectors of the economy. Increasing Web resources from distributed spatial data portals and global geospatial libraries, and a growing suite of Web integration tools, will provide new opportunities to advance disease surveillance, control, and prevention, and insure public access and community empowerment in public health decision making. Emerging supercomputing, data mining, compression, and transmission technologies will play increasingly critical roles in national emergency, catastrophic planning and response, and risk management. Web-enabled public health GIS will be guided by Federal Geographic Data Committee spatial metadata, OpenGIS Web interoperability, and GML/XML geospatial Web content standards. Public health will become a responsive and integral part of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure.
Establishing a spatial data infrastructure means improving the existing one and can be defined as a number of activities aiming at easier access to and wider dissemination of the existing spatial ...data, and easier and more efficient use of them. Considering importance and benefits of the spatial data infrastructure for the whole society, the improvement should be seen as a public project of permanent character. This paper gives a theoretical overview of planning and implementation of such project, as a possible model of improving the existing national spatial data infrastructure in Croatia.
The basic aim of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) built in accordance with INSPIRE directive is to standardize spatial data infrastructure on national level. In that direction, ...topographic maps are a basic platform for acquiring spatial data within geoinformation systems and one of the most important segments of NSDI. This paper presents methodology of establishing the new digital topographic map of the Republic of Macedonia titled “State Base Map for GIS in Macedonia”. This paper analyzes geometrical accuracy of new digital topographic maps. Production of the new digital topographic map has been the most important cartographic project in the Republic of Macedonia since it became independent.
The National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) was envisioned as a way of enhancing the accessibility, communication, and use of geospatial data to support a wide variety of decisions at all levels ...of society. The goals of the NSDI are to reduce redundancy in geospatial data creation and maintenance, reduce the costs of geospatial data creation and maintenance, improve access to geospatial data, and improve the accuracy of geospatial data used by the broader community. At the core of the NSDI is the concept of partnerships, or collaborations, between different agencies, corporations, institutions, and levels of government. In a previous report, the Mapping Science Committee (MSC) defined a partnership as "...a joint activity of federal and state agencies, involving one or more agencies as joint principals focusing on geographic information." The concept of partnerships was built on the foundation of shared responsibilities, shared costs, shared benefits, and shared control. Partnerships are designed to share the costs of creation and maintenance of geospatial data, seeking to avoid unnecessary duplication, and to make it possible for data collected by one agency at a high level of spatial detail to be used by another agency in more generalized form. Over the past seven years, a series of funding programs administered by the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) has stimulated the creation of such partnerships, and thereby promoted the objectives of the NSDI, by raising awareness of the need for a coordinated national approach to geospatial data creation, maintenance, and use. They include the NSDI Cooperative Agreements Program, the Framework Demonstration Projects Program, the Community Demonstration Projects, and the Community-Federal Information Partnerships proposal. This report assesses the success of the FGDC partnership programs that have been established between the federal government and state and local government, industry, and academic communities in promoting the objectives of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure.
Recently, the circumstances of the world's national mapping organizations have changed due to various factors such as the computerization of mapping technologies, development of GIS and the Internet, ...global environmental problems and government restructuring. The new roles of national mapping organizations in the era of GIS should be to: 1) provide and maintain a unique framework for exchanging and sharing geo-spatial data as a social infrastructure and 2) contribute to sustainable development by providing accurate, current geographic information on the global environment. The Geographical Survey Institute (GSI), the national mapping organization of the Japanese Government, has adopted such roles by promoting the Digital Japan Project and the Global Mapping Project. GSI developed the Denshi Kokudo Web System to provide a platform for various geo-spatial data applying web-mapping technologies to realize the Digital Japan concept. This system enables users to dispatch original geographic information without having to prepare background map data. GSI also acts as the secretariat of the International Steering Committee for Global Mapping. The Global Mapping Project develops digital geographic information covering the earth's surface at 1km resolution with standardized specifications available to all through cooperation among national mapping organizations around the world. This paper outlines the background, history and current status of these projects.
PDF
