Exploring the Colorado Geospatial Portal

The Colorado Geospatial Portal (https://geodata.colorado.gov/) allows both trained GIS professionals and members of the general public to discover geospatial technology across the state. The site includes a spatial data portal, a map viewer to visualize various datasets, links to state and federal geospatial partners, and open resources such as trainings. The goal of the site is to provide a centralized location for all GIS users to find data, explore applications, or find contacts for their own purposes. As a longtime resident of Colorado, I can attest to the vibrancy of the GIS community here. This portal is indeed what many of us have been dreaming about for years; therefore I salute Jackie Phipps Montes, our state of Colorado GIO, and her team. Jackie says the following:

“The Spatial Data Portal aims to provide accessible and authoritative data to drive decision-making statewide. Previously, geospatial data could be found across 14 different locations such as the  Colorado Information Marketplace (CIM) or individual agency websites. However, these methods either have limited geospatial functionality or rely on the end user to understand the agency structure across the state. The Spatial Data Portal tries to remove this barrier. We work with our agency partners to pull their data, maps, applications, and links to their geospatial resources. The result is one place to discover the numerous resources across the state.”

“These efforts aim to make geospatial more discoverable for a wide audience. We want our geospatial technologies, data, and resources to fully embrace the Digital Equity, Literacy, and Inclusion Initiative.  The Governor’s Office of Information Technology will continue curating content for the Spatial Data Portal striving to provide relevant data, consistent sources, and to provide resources to make navigating and using geospatial technology and data easier in the State of Colorado.”

I look forward to your reactions and how you are using the portal!

—Joseph Kerski

Connections between Geospatial Data and Becoming a Data Professional

Dr. Dawn Wright, Chief Scientist at Esri, recently shared a presentation she gave on the topic of “A Geospatial Industry Perspective on Becoming a Data Professional.”

How can GIS and Big Data be conceptualized and applied to solve problems?  How can the way we define and train data professionals move the integration of Big Data and GIS simultaneously forward?  How can GIS as a system and GIS as a science be brought together to meet the challenges we face as a global community?   What is the difference between a classic GIS researcher and a modern GIS researcher?   How and why must GIS become part of open science?

These issues and more are examined in the slides and the thought-provoking text underneath each slide.  Geographic Information Science has long welcomed strong collaborations among computer scientists, information scientists, and other Earth scientists to solve complex scientific questions, and therefore parallels the emergence as well as the acceptance of “data science.”

But the researchers and developers in “data science” need to be encouraged and recruited from somewhere, and once they have arrived, they need to blaze a lifelong learning pathway.  Therefore, germane to any discussion on emerging fields such as data science is how students are educated, trained, and recruited–here, as data professionals within the geospatial industry.  Such discussion needs to include certification, solving problems, critical thinking, and ascribing to codes of ethics.

I submit that the integration of GIS and open science not only will be enriched by the immersion of issues that we bring up in this blog and in our book, but is actually dependent in large part on researchers and developers who understand such issues and can put them into practice.  What issues?  Issues of understanding geospatial data and knowing how to apply it to real-world problems, of scale, or data quality, of crowdsourcing, of data standards and portals, and others that we frequently raise here.  Nurturing these skills and abilities in geospatial professionals is a key way of helping GIS become a key part of data science, and our ability to move GIS from being a “niche” technology or perspective to one that all data scientists use and share.

This presentation by Dr. Dawn Wright touches on the themes of data and this blog from a professional development perspective.