Data sharing agreement signed

We concluded the signing yesterday of a Working Agreement between AZGS, on behalf of the AASG-USGS Geoscience Information Network (GIN), and the Western Regional Partnership (WRP).

The Western Regional Partnership (www.wrpinfo.org) was established to create a regional senior policy level partnership among the Department of Defense (DoD), other Federal agencies, and State and Tribal executive leadership in the states of Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah. The primary mission is to identify common goals and emerging issues, and to develop solutions that support WRP Partners and protect natural resources, while promoting sustainability, homeland security and military readiness.

Under the agreement, the two groups will work together to build a distributive online open source data network, associated web mapping service catalogs, and increase use of the data portfolio with reputable and authoritative web mapping services. In addition, the groups will coordinate efforts to ensure performance standards between GIN and the WRP mapping application while collaborating on system design, web applications, data models, and content. GIN and WRP will continually work together to avoid duplication of data by establishing or adopting methodologies for assigning uniform unique identifiers to data items and datasets, and ensure that uniform metadata are associated with these resources.

The WRP online Web Mapping Application is building a central GIS repository of an expected 10,000 land use and land management data layers for the region, with 3,500 layers already submitted to the WRP catalog. AZGS will work with WRP staff to link the repository with GIN and develop shared services and applications. The WRP data sets will also feed into the National Geothermal Data System (NGDS) to support geothermal exploration, development, and planning and management activities by industry and government. DoD will fund the WRP work, AZGS will do our work as part of the State Geothermal Data Project.