Partnering for the People

Abstract

During the past few years, the term “partnership” has been elevated in the Federal government to the state of an integral business practice, and rightly so. However, some Federal agencies have been partnering successfully for many decades. Two such agencies, the Department of Commerce’s U.S. Census Bureau and the Department of the Interior’s U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), have had partnerships that resulted in fundamental changes to the field of geographic data processing. While these agencies had cooperated successfully on projects earlier, from 1983 to 1989, they conducted a major partnership that resulted in the creation of the USGS’ 1:100,000-scale Digital Line Graph (DLG) and the Census Bureau’s Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing (TIGER) database. These datasets changed not only Federal geographic data processing practices but also set the course for future geographic data processing in state, local, and tribal governments, as well as in academia and private industry. Now, both agencies have embarked on ambitious programs to improve and evolve their datasets to meet more demanding Federal and other needs for the coming decades. The Census Bureau is improving its combined Master Address File (MAF) and TIGER database through an effort known as the MAF/TIGER Accuracy Improvement Project (MTAIP). Simultaneously, the USGS is undertaking the creation of The National Map, the initial foundation of which is existing datasets such as the National Hydrography Dataset (NHD). Although each agency’s program objectives are unique to their respective missions, the products of their labors are, once again, complementary. Given their history of partnership, it was logical for the Census Bureau and the USGS to again share risks and results. Commonalities between their respective databases and missions have been identified and an effort launched to reduce redundancy in data collection and preparation, while still assuring the objectives of the resulting databases are achieved and meet the overarching objectives of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI).