From
my perspective, few things are as important as having U.S.State and local
health departments connect to Intranet and Internet environments and share
geospatial data holdings and metadata, standardized for interoperability.
State and local health departments are the public health building blocks
for the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI).Recently, several
noteworthy developments of connecting local geospatial health databases
to the public have occurred in
South
Carolina and
California.
The South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control and First
5 California [formerly California Children and Families Commission], respectively,
have created online public GIS accessibility to a variety of small area
public health geospatial databases that only a few years ago might not
have been available.
[Editor's note: First 5 California was the 2nd
place winner for the government category in our recent Web Mapping Contest.]
Key
issues of spatial data standards, metadata, Internet interoperability and
data confidentiality may well dictate the pace at which we roll out the
public health spatial data infrastructure piece of the NSDI.The Mapping
Science Committee of the National Research Council has made this similar
message clear over the years to the entire GIS community.In the July 2003
edition of
Public Health GIS
News and Information, I reiterated some of these conditions as
they pertain to DHHS.If we proceed without uniform geospatial data content
standards, we will be relegated to the lowest resolution format of spatial
data integration.Much higher resolution data will not be part of the national
picture and much resource will be expended to reconcile disparities.Standardized
protocols are needed for how we define, make accessible and share data,
and (especially in public health) protect the confidentiality of individuals
and households (and possibly others) in the database.
I
call your attention to the latest (2003) General Accounting Office
testimony,
"Geographic Information Systems: Challenges to Effective Data Sharing".
It clearly warns that the federal government Geospatial One-Stop initiative,
in the absence of:
-
Standardized
geospatial data;
-
Consistent
implementation of standards across government;
-
Creation
of a complete and useful inventory of federal data holdings and their respective
metadata; and
-
Inclusion
of all representative stakeholders in the decision making process
...will
face serious challenges to implementing the NSDI anytime soon.It serves
to remind us to continue to work diligently on the bindings that insure
geospatial data integration.
[Editor's
Note: Dr.Croner serves as Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS)
Representative to the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) and Editor,Public
Health GIS News and Information.He is a Geographer and Survey
Statistician with the National Center for Health Statistics, Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention, Hyattsville, Maryland