Twenty Years of Spatial Vision, But What Does 1987 Look Like in Your GIS? – Emerging Issues, Hindsight and Insights from the NC Preservation Partnership Steve Morris NCSU Libraries Abby Smith Library of Congress NC GIS 2007March 2, 2007

NDIIPP2 National Digital Information and Infrastructure Preservation Program (NDIIPP) To ensure access over time to a rich body of digital content through the establishment of a national network of committed partners, collaborating in a digital preservation architecture with defined roles and responsibilities

NDIIPP3 NDIIPP Objectives Develop a national digital collection and preservation strategy Build a network of partnerships Explore protocols and standards to support partnership operations Identify and preserve at-risk digital content Support development of tools, models, and methods for digital preservation

NDIIPP4 Network of Preservation Partners Volume and complexity of digital content calls for a distributed approach LC is providing resources and leadership to construct a network of preservation partners Primary outcomes for partnerships: –Identify and preserve significant content –Leverage resources, experience via collaborative network –Promote standards and best practices

NDIIPP5 Goals for the Partnerships Share strategies for digital content selection/collection Probe intellectual property issues Collaborate in developing a technical architecture Study economics and incentives Identify and share best practices Learn how to build and sustain partnerships

NDIIPP6

7 Geospatial Data Focus of Partners NC State University and NC CGIA UC Santa Barbara and Stanford U of Tennessee Knoxville San Diego Supercomputer Center, Scripps Institute of Oceanography, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute U of Michigan: Social science data U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: State government publications, among other content

NDIIPP8 Why Geospatial Data? Congressional interest Growing importance for all aspects of: Government Business Science & technology Cultural expression Social software

NDIIPP9 Why Geospatial Data Networks? Leverage existing efforts Model cooperation & coordination at different scales Public/private partnerships Recognized need for expertise in tempero- spatial data collection, analysis, & long- term management

10 NC Geospatial Data Archiving Project (NCGDAP) Partnership between NCSU Libraries and NCCGIA with Library of Congress under NDIIPP One of 8 NDIIPP Digital Preservation Partners projects Focus on state and local geospatial content in North Carolina (state demonstration) Tied to NC OneMap initiative objective: “Historic and temporal data will be maintained and available.” Objective: engage existing state/federal geospatial data infrastructures in preservation

11 Temporal Data Supports Decision Making Land use change analysis Real Estate trend analysis Site selection (past uses?) Forecasting Parcel Boundary Changes North Raleigh, NC

12 Digital Preservation Points of Failure Data is not saved, or … can’t be found, or … media is obsolete, or … media is corrupt, or … format is obsolete, or … file is corrupt, or … meaning is lost Solutions: MigrationEmulation EncapsulationXML

13 Different Ways to Approach Preservation Technical solutions: How do we archive acquired content over the long term? Cultural/Organizational solutions: How do we make the data more preservable—and more prone to be archived— from point of production?

14 A “temporally- impaired” industry begins to discover time and the value of older data Major vendors and consulting firms begin to see temporal data management and analysis as a customer problem Project Surprises: Emerging Industry Interest in Data Longevity

15 The true counterpart to the old map is not the GIS dataset but rather the finished geographic product (map, chart, etc.) More than data—also classification, layering, symbolization, annotation, modeling, more … Project Surprises: Handling PDF as a Geospatial Format

16 County and city agencies beginning to digitize old maps and aerial imagery NCGDAP-georectified maps made available for download and put in the National Geologic Map Database Project Surprises: Resurrecting Old Maps Superceded USGS Topo Maps Geologic Maps from Theses, Dissertations, and Reports

17 Project Surprises: Engaging Standards Efforts Partnered with EDINA (UK) and NARA to approach the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) in Working Group charter approved by OGC Technical Committee plenary Dec. 2006

18 High volume of state/federal requests for local data – spurs rethinking of archive strategy for data acquisition Leveraging more compelling business reasons to put the data in motion Changes in the Domain: Emerging Content Exchange Networks Orthophoto “sneakernet” system Started fall 2006 Transportation data exchange system Funded starting fall 2006 Ongoing statewide data inventory Started March 2006

19 Huge new audience for geospatial content Massive crossover of mainstream IT to geospatial, spurring open source activities: e.g. WMS tiling and caching “Good enough” approaches to data (formats, quality, standards) Changes in the Domain: Mashups, Google Earth, Map APIs, and More

20 Mobile, LBS, and, social networking applications Long-term cultural heritage value in non-overhead imagery: more descriptive of place and function Changes in the Domain: More Place-based (versus spatial) Data Oblique Imagery Street View Images DOT Videologs Tax Dept. Photos

21 NC Frequency of Capture Survey Survey objective: Document current practices for obtaining archival snapshots of county/municipal geospatial vector data layers Seek guidance about frequency of capture Survey topics: General questions about data archiving practice Specific questions about parcels, street centerlines, jurisdictional boundaries, and zoning Survey subjects: All 100 counties and 25 municipalities 58% response rate Survey conducted September 2006

22 Survey Results: Overview Two-thirds of responding agencies create and retain periodic snapshots Long-term retention more common in counties with larger populations Storage environments vary, with servers and CD- ROMs most common Offsite storage (or both onsite and offsite) is used by nearly half of the respondents Popularity of historic images has resulted in scanning and geo-referencing of hardcopy aerial photos among one-third of the respondents

23 What’s Next? Technical Acquiring and ingesting data Refining ingest system Exploring new metadata approaches Exploring “Neogeography” space Engagement OGC Data Preservation Working Group Collaboration with State Archives More site visits

24 Questions? Steve Morris Digital Library Initiatives NCSU Libraries NCGDAP: NDIIPP: Abby Smith NDIIPP