Grants seed mapping projects
- By Greg Langlois
- Jan 18, 2001
The Federal Geographic Data Committee has released applications for $1 million
in grants to help organizations work toward making digital geographic data
consistent and accessible.
Teams of organizations awarded money in the fiscal 2001 National Spatial
Data Infrastructure Cooperative
Agreement Program will develop projects to further the NSDI effort. That
effort is aimed at improving the ability of disparate organizations nationwide
to produce, share and use geographic data.
"The idea is to stimulate actions that will hopefully keep going within
organizations" after a project's one-year funding is used up, said John
Moeller, staff director of the FGDC. He described the grants as "seed money
to encourage organizations to build partnerships toward implementing the
NSDI—to find out what works."
Teams of federal, state and local governments, academic institutions
and regional, tribal, for-profit and nonprofit organizations may apply.
Applications must be filed by March 14, and the FGDC will notify winners
in July.
The FGDC will award projects in four categories, two of which deal with
geographic metadata—data describing geographic data—which the FGDC says
"is a basic first step in implementing the NSDI." A third addresses Web
mapping that is compliant with Open GIS Consortium Inc. standards, and the
last, with more stringent requirements, involves supporting a framework—data sets of common geographic features—that can be shared by U.S. and
Canadian organizations.
The FGDC expects to award about 40 metadata projects, 10 Web mapping
projects and two framework projects. Moeller said he expects the FGDC to
receive 70 to 100 applications.
Since the program's inception in 1994, the FGDC has awarded grants for
more than 300 projects, he said.