—Steve Lewis, US DOT
As part of a NSGIC initiative, the US DOT will begin to meet its responsibility under OMB Circular A-16 to advance strategic planning for the realization of a national framework for Transportation for the Nation (TFTN). This session is a step in a strategic planning process designed to stimulate discussion on the opportunities, interests, best practices, institutional constraints, resource requirements, and benefits of TFTN. The results will help to address key questions and assumptions about TFTN and to develop a strategic vision for TFTN. TFTN refers to the goal of coordinating and developing nationally significant transportation data, with initial emphasis on road centerlines. Some of the TFTN challenges are: a) Overlapping transportation datasets that vary in scale, coverage, formats, documentation, geometry and attributes; b) Transportation data developed and maintained by a variety of public and private entities with diverse objectives, requirements, capacities and resources; c) Public and private sectors further aggregating, integrating, attributing, and converting transportation data to serve distinct purposes (routing, planning, performance monitoring, emergency response, on-board navigation). Building on the general agreement that TFTN is an important concept and framework data for the nation, this session will focus on the specific ways in which TFTN is potentially important to various levels of government and the private sector. This session will introduce the strategic planning process underway, and it will outline and solicit different points of view on the key opportunities, benefits and constraints affecting TFTN.