Leveraging your GIS as a Collaborative Platform

Collaborative Sourcing, Integration and Curation of Multiple Geospatial Datasets

—David Smith, USEPA

Integrating across multiple data sources and collaborative stewardship and curation facilitates improved analysis, breaks through stovepipes and improves problem solving. EPA's Facility Registry System (FRS) integrates locational and other data attributes from 32 Federal data sources, and 57 state and tribal databases to aggregate their content on regulated facilities to aid in modeling, policy, analysis and other business processes across a wide variety of areas. FRS utilizes a number of approaches, from leveraging EPA's Exchange Network and web services, to more conventional processes, along with collaborative editing tools to support a network of stewards, toward integration and curation.