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GCN Home > 03/21/05 issue

Geographic profile on the way for Federal Enterprise Architecture

By Jason Miller, GCN Staff

As the FEA matures, agencies work on fleshing it out and adding more tools

Ivan DeLoatch believes every piece of information has a geographic component. Whether it’s data about military troops or financial audits or food processing, the staff director for the Federal Geographic Data Committee says geographic information cuts across every agency line of business.

To that end, DeLoatch is leading an effort to develop a Geographic Information Systems profile for the Federal Enterprise Architecture.

Much like the security and privacy profile, created last year by the Office of Management and Budget’s FEA Program Management Office and the CIO Council, the GIS profile will illustrate where agencies are investing in geodata. That information will make it easier to create and share the data, DeLoatch said.

“You can take the geodata and overlay it on topography or hydrography or many other types of data, and it will help agencies address the challenges we have,” he said. “The biggest benefit will be the ability to improve our knowledge of our lines of business.”

Richard Burk, OMB’s chief architect, said at a recent conference on EA that he realized the benefits of standardizing geodata when he worked at the Housing and Urban Development Department. Using a GIS profile for HUD’s EA, a program manager saw that putting a public housing site near a waste management site was a problem.

The Federal Geographic Data Committee is working with the CIO Council and at least five agencies—the departments of Agriculture and Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Ad-ministration—on the profile. State and local government groups such as the National Association of State CIOs also are taking part.

DeLoatch said the goal is to create a national GIS profile, not just a federal one.

DeLoatch and Karen Siderelis, associate director for geospatial information at the Geological Survey, presented their ideas to the CIO Council late last year and are now partnering with the council’s Architecture and Infrastructure Committee.

“GIS is a common thread through everything we are doing, much like security and privacy,” said Kim Nelson, chairwoman of the council committee and the EPA’s CIO. “We will use the Geospatial One-Stop architecture, which is a service-oriented architecture.”

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