Central Pennsylvania GeoPortal

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Center for Geospatial Information
Services Institute of State and Regional Affairs
Central Pennsylvania GeoPortal
Advancing Sustainability with Geospatial Knowledge
A Plan to Create a Collaborative,
Web-based Knowledge Portal of the Economy,
Ecology, and Demography of Central Pennsylvania

A project of the Center for Geospatial
Information Services At Penn State Harrisburgs
Institute of State and Regional Affairs 777 West
Harrisburg Pike Middletown, PA
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Center for Geospatial Information
Services Institute of State and Regional Affairs
What Is a GeoPortal? Why Do We Need a
GeoPortal? What Geography Will It Cover? What
Knowledge Will It Contain? Who Will Build and
Maintain It? What Is the Sustainable Business
Model? How Will We Get Started
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Center for Geospatial Information
Services Institute of State and Regional Affairs
What is a GeoPortal?
Knowledge of place or location is central to
our understanding of socio-economic,
environmental, and political realities. A
GeoPortal provides a web-based means for
discovering, viewing, editing, and contributing
information about various geographies census
tracts, municipalities, counties, regions,
watersheds, development areas, legislative and
congressional districts, market areas, and many
others. A GeoPortal allows users to access
information by viewing a map and selecting areas
of interest to explore.   Most current
GeoPortals are one-way affairs and only allow
users to display, print, and sometimes download
information about an area. But the emerging
generation of GeoPortals (such as Open GreenMap
and OpenStreetMap) will follow the Web 2.0
paradigm and encourage users to contribute
knowledge via a concept called volunteered
geographic information or VGI a form of
collective intelligence. One of the goals of the
Central PA GeoPortal is to incorporate these
functions and create a truly dynamic, user
supported knowledge base of our region.
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Center for Geospatial Information
Services Institute of State and Regional Affairs
Why Do We Need a GeoPortal?
The events of 9/11, the current economic
situation, and other events since the turn of
this century have heightened our awareness of how
deeply inter-connected the myriad facets of our
culture really are. Natural disasters, terrorist
attacks, economic recessions, political
sea-changes, and swings in cultural trends often
initiate cascading impacts many of which are
unpredictable, unanticipated, and seemingly
irrational.   Too often we look back and realize
that we should have seen it coming. We have
the data and the tools to recognize both the
ominous signs and the opportunities for
avoidance. Unfortunately, most of the data is
warehoused, stove-piped, fragmented, and
otherwise inaccessible. A GeoPortal, as described
above, offers a promising means of tapping the
data we already possess and turning it in to
actionable knowledge.
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Center for Geospatial Information
Services Institute of State and Regional Affairs
What Geography Will it Cover?
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Center for Geospatial Information
Services Institute of State and Regional Affairs
Expandable from a single county
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Center for Geospatial Information
Services Institute of State and Regional Affairs
to multi-county groups
Expandable from a single county
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Center for Geospatial Information
Services Institute of State and Regional Affairs
to multi-county groups
to the South Central Region
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Center for Geospatial Information
Services Institute of State and Regional Affairs
to the South Central Region
to the Susquehanna Basin
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Center for Geospatial Information
Services Institute of State and Regional Affairs
What Knowledge Will it Contain?
A GeoPortal is first, an indexed view of where
things are their absolute locations on the
earths surface and their locations relative to
each other. The GeoPortal will contain all the
features one would expect to see on a consumer
travel map roads highways cities and towns
streams and water bodies important commercial,
governmental, recreational, and cultural
features airports and railways topography and
aerial imagery. The geospatial industry refers
to this base information as framework layers.
  But beyond locations the portal will open
access to attribute information about these
spatial features environmental, economic,
demographic, socio-cultural, and governmental.
Very importantly and building on the framework
layers, GeoPortal partners and collaborators will
contribute new layers of information with their
own domain of locations and attributes. The
data, information, and knowledge connected
through the GeoPortal can, with some open and
innovative thinking, evolve into a networked,
collective intelligence about our region.
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Center for Geospatial Information
Services Institute of State and Regional Affairs
Who Will Build and Maintain It?
The GeoPortal will be built and maintained by its
partners and contributors along with a small
staff of Penn State Harrisburg professionals who
will facilitate, support, moderate, and referee
content. The Penn State Harrisburg staff will
also, in collaboration with others, build the
web-based GeoPortal engine and maintain user
contributed data and metadata.   Much of the
framework data already exists. Aerial imagery
and topography transportation networks
hydrography and political, administrative, and
census boundaries are maintained at Penn States
PASDA and the State Data Center at Penn State
Harrisburg. Other data layers will be created
and contributed by a wide range of users with
interests in the region municipalities,
counties, state government, watershed and river
basin organizations, local and regional
authorities, and others.
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Center for Geospatial Information
Services Institute of State and Regional Affairs
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Center for Geospatial Information
Services Institute of State and Regional Affairs
What Is the Sustainable Business Model?
The GeoPortal will be knowledge sustained by
publicly available data from places like PASDA,
PA State Data Center, USGS, other public data and
statistical outlets, and community collaborators.
The portal will be resource sustained by the
Penn State Harrisburg staff and professional
volunteer collaborators. The portal will be
financially sustained in the following
ways   Seed funding to build the initial system
and develop a critical mass for the project. The
source of this funding can be Penn State itself
along with charter investors such as the
Regional Chamber, counties and municipalities,
private firms, and foundations. Long term
sustainable funding will include continued
contributions by the seed funders along with
various levels and classes of sponsors and
subscribers. Customized and off the shelf
map products and services will also be developed
and offered to the community on a for fee basis.
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Center for Geospatial Information
Services Institute of State and Regional Affairs
The GeoPortal Will Be A Success If It

• Creates useful functionality to the community
  it becomes their go to site
• Can offer a high value proposition to
  collaborators/investors opportunity and image
• Is viewed by the community as a valuable Penn
  State Harrisburg outreach service
• Involves a broad cross-section of Penn State
  Harrisburg faculty/staff
• Can help to further the community presence of
  Penn State Harrisburg
• Can help improve the quality of life in South
  Central Pennsylvania

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Center for Geospatial Information
Services Institute of State and Regional Affairs
How Do We Get Started?

• Assemble small team of outward energy
  collaborators (community/political)
• Assemble small team of inward energy
  collaborators -- (technology professionals)
• Development presentation for introduction and
  promotion to community
• Build small prototype application that can be
  used to demonstrate the concept
• Recruit project partners/investors to support
  initial development
• Evolve the working prototype into a
  full-functioning model
• Promote to the broader community and begin to
  recruit knowledge contributors
• Build sustaining energy within community users,
  contributors, financial supporters

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Center for Geospatial Information
Services Institute of State and Regional Affairs
QUESTIONS? Brady M. Stroh, Director Center for
Geospatial Information Services ISRA Penn State
Harrisburg Phone [phone] Email
bms16_at_psu.edu or bradystroh_at_gmail.com