Citation[]
The White House, Executive Order 12906, Coordinating Geographic Data Acquisition and Access: The National Spatial Data Infrastructure, 59 Fed. Reg. 17671-74 (Apr. 11, 1994) (full-text).
Overview[]
This Executive Order established the National Spatial Data Infrastructure to support public and private sector applications of geospatial data in such areas as transportation, community development, agriculture, emergency response, environmental management, and information technology.
Several objectives were defined to promote the population of the NSDI with geospatial data held by Federal agencies and other organizations. These included:
- inventory of spatial data holdings
- development of a plan to document new spatial data sets
- documentation of all data sets created after January 11, 1995
- placement of descriptive information (metadata) in an online searchable service starting in January 1995
- online access to spatial data sets through the metadata, where feasible.
This Executive Order also established an electronic National Geospatial Data Clearinghouse for the NSDI to address data standardization, make geospatial data publicly available, and address redundancy and incompatibility of geospatial information.
