dc.gov releases a pile of data!
As someone that once spent a summer internship in Washington DC working for the DC Government, I really enjoyed living there. I was absolutely stoked to see this post on the Google Lat Long blog outlining why they are releasing over 84,000 3d buildings to Google Earth. I love the key points that Barney Krucoff, the GIS Manager for DC makes.
- It is the right thing to do.
- Because every neighborhood can benefit from 3D.
- We get better 3D performance from the cloud and we don’t pay for it.
- We want to communicate with our residents.
It kinda makes you sad to live in a country that doesn’t even see the value in being able to produce and maintain a national authoritative roading dataset, and here is local government saying – here is more than 200 geospatial datasets. Go for it. Download in ESRI or Google formats (I assume shapefile and KMZ). Not only that, but they appear to have a nice data warehouse for attribute data, as well as subscribable feeds for updates.
This is what is required for eGovernment – Government making the information available, in formats that support geospatial applications, with permissive licensing terms. It is also key to having residents take data and mash it up, and give it a life of its own. But that won’t happen until all the fundamental data about the places we live are released out into the electronic wilds.
Isn’t it the case that the USA doesn’t have an authoritative roading database, either? That’s why Navteq, TeleAtlas, and Google have to drive the roads. (And, except for Google, make plenty of money selling that information to in-car nav unit manufacturers, logistics companies, emergency services, etc.)
Nat Torkington
15 Sep 08 at 14:53