President Message

The past four months have been a busy time for the consortium as we have moved to capitalize on some of the opportunities that were launched or advanced in conjunction with the highly successful 2006 Winter Meeting in Washington DC.

First and foremost, we just today signed a contract with the National Security Agency for the Dynamics Workshop that we will host in October 2006. The call for participation was distributed several months ago and the two organizers – Kathleen Hornsby (University of Maine) and May Yuan (University of Oklahoma) – will begin notifying the successful applicants about their participation in the next few weeks. This will be an important and exciting event and one that will lead to two publications – a short proceedings volume for the sponsor agency and then a longer and more substantial academic book that draws on the work of the workshop participants. My own view is that we need to work to discover new opportunities for convening and running these types of events so we can involve more of our members and spread our contributions more broadly across the geographic information science field.

A second event was our participation in a special federal workshop organized and hosted by the Department of Homeland Security on emergency preparedness. We were one of just five non-federal agencies invited to attend the first two days of this workshop which was limited to federal agencies. I gave a presentation on how the UCGIS and its members could help to advance the nation’s geospatial emergency preparedness. I was joined on the third day of the meeting by Sean Ahern and Jack Sanders (this part of the meeting was open to other organizations and private sector firms and attracted an audience of 200+ people) after which the three of us attended another meeting with some key DHS folks at which we were given an additional opportunity to pitch how the UCGIS and its members might help DHS in terms of emergency preparedness. I’ve attached a one page statement that I prepared with the help of colleagues from 10+ member schools so that you could see more of what was proposed, and I am busy now following up on these meetings to see whether we can turn this goodwill into something more tangible for the organization and its members.

The third event was a special pre-conference workshop convened by Nick Chrisman from GEOIDE in Canada and Stewart Fotheringham from the National Geocomputation Centre in Ireland. This meeting, which preceded the Annual GEOIDE Conference in Banff, Alberta, was attended by representatives of 12 national and international associations. The discussion focused on ways to promote international cooperation and sharing across the geospatial domain. This meeting was important for getting the dialogue started and was useful for UCGIS given the opportunities it presented in terms of rekindling our ties with both AGILE and GEOIDE. AGILE, for example, would like to collaborate with us in advancing the "body of knowledge" project (as would ASPRS), and both AGILE and GEOIDE would like to work with us to promote a regular program of faculty and student exchanges across the various conferences, workshops, and short courses offered by these groups. Discussions are proceeding on exactly how we can accomplish these goals.

Beyond these special activities, there is the usual set of tasks required to keep our organization running. Much of this work is contributed by volunteers and the results are best seen in terms of the publications (the first edition of the body of knowledge will be published in conjunction with the Association of American Geographers later this year) and the two meetings – the Winter Meeting in Washington DC and the Summer Assembly that this year will be held in Vancouver, Washington – that the consortium organizes and hosts each year. To this I would add the ongoing work required to engage and involve our members in as many of the consortium’s activities as possible and the work that will be required in the next couple of years to strengthen the consortium’s finances. These tasks are intertwined and the Board of Directors will discuss broad parameters for two new initiatives – a federal internship program and a fellows program – that would advance both goals at this year’s summer assembly.

Proposal to Establish UCGIS Geospatial Security Network (GS-Net)

The geospatial information infrastructure developed in New York City in the late 1990s provided the foundation for the response and recovery efforts during 9/11 and arguably saved the City of New York tens of millions of dollars in costs by expediting the City’s return to normalcy. Geospatial technologies enabled the city to evaluate, inspect and map out damaged buildings, streets and underground infrastructure and manage the logistics of its cleanup and repair. Conversely, the response to Hurricane Katrina was stymied in part because fundamental geographic information was not available in the first weeks of the response effort, an experience that has caused the Gulf Coast and other regions to re-evaluate their preparedness for coping with natural disasters and other threats.

The University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS) proposes the establishment of a national Geospatial Security Network (GS-Net) to provide FEMA with real-time, on-the-ground geographic information to support crisis decision-making for a small number of "at risk" regions throughout the US. The UCGIS, the preeminent consortium of Universities engaged in geospatial research, is uniquely qualified to undertake the development of GS-Net. It has the expertise, a cadre of faculty and trained students who could respond to an emergency and has the local knowledge and relationships required to build and assemble a regional data set for emergency response. GS-Net will initially be composed of a small number of regional nodes in a flexible framework that is designed to capture and accommodate regional diversity given existing threats related to terrorism, hurricanes and floods, tornadoes and wildfire, earthquakes, and other hazards.

Specifically UCGIS will in preparation for a disaster:

Develop protocols for collecting/sharing geospatial data between counties, utilities, etc. and FEMA’s response teams at the JFO during the event. The protocol will be consistent with MEDS, NIMS, and relevant DHS/FEMA geospatial policies.
Organize, assemble, identify gaps, and fill in geospatial foundation data required during the event for each of the chosen regions and hazards on an annual basis.
Conduct geospatial technology R&D to advance the data models, analysis and scenarios used to anticipate and manage emergency response.
Organize workshops to train disaster managers and first responders in real-time, on-the-ground decision support using geospatial technologies.
In response to a disaster:
Deploy geospatial technologies and precompiled geospatial data 'bundles' to provide fundamental support for rescue, assessment, logistics and recovery.
Mobilize UCGIS experts from around the country to provide R&D expertise that exceeds the operational capabilities of the FEMA JFO staff.

The proposed GS-Net will follow a federated management structure and architecture in which the UCGIS plays a key coordination role and the bulk of the heavy lifting (work) is performed by a small number of semi-autonomous UCGIS member nodes. Funds are needed for three years to support national planning and coordination and to build the exemplary systems at each of the nodes in this network. The experience of building these systems will demonstrate what types of programs and resources will be required in the future to turn science into practice and to show how federal, state, and local geospatial datasets can be integrated and used to support disaster preparedness and management across the nation.

...John Wilson

next page