Our FGDC Presentation for the ESRI UC

As part of our work on the Federal Geographic Data Committee’s CAP Grant Category 4 we were invited, along with the other awardees, to present the project at USGS’s booth for the ESRI user conference this past week. Unfortunately we were prevented from attending by the conference organizers. This was disappointing and confusing, but we wanted to share the work we’ve been doing as part of the grant.

The title of the grant is “Enabling Use of Government Tabular Data in a Geographic Context” and we are very excited about the potential of getting more geo-enabled data out to the public. We are up to 14,000 publicly available data sets in GeoCommons and we believe the grant work will really help us and the US government to open up more geo-enabled data to the public.

Increasing geo-enabled content will mean more reasons to use all the awesome tools that GIS and GeoWeb companies are creating. We’ve seen a huge surge in technology in the past five years, and we’ll need an equal surge in data to feed all our technologies, increasing their utility and relevance to the public. The more data we can geo-enable from government, NGO’s and other open sources the greater the public good created, empowering more innovation and business to be built on top of it.

Below is the presentation delivered via Slideshare. We open sourced the geocoder for the project as part of the first phase and we look forward to launching the rest of the work as we wrap it up. Stay tuned on the blog and GeoCommons for more updates soon.