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State Poised to Stand Up 'Transformative' GIS Data Portal

The aggregated platform will stitch together various agencies' resources, making GIS mapping data available to state and local government as well as businesses and individuals. The driver behind the project is Scott Gregory, the state’s Chief Technology Innovation Officer and Geographic Information Officer, who says the new portal is "going to be rocket fuel."

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The state will soon open the door to a wealth of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) mapping data – a trove of information about California and Californians that previously hasn’t been accessible from a central online location.  

The announcement was made Friday by Scott Gregory, the state’s Chief Technology Innovation Officer, who also serves as the state Geographic Information Officer within the California Department of Technology’s Enterprise Technology Office.  

“The delivery date is Dec. 25,” Gregory told Techwire, “so it’s a little bit of a data present.”

Gregory explained that this is the state’s first effort to aggregate, in one platform, all the various existing GIS datasets from across state government’s many websites and repositories.

The URL for the new portal hasn’t been made public yet. Techwire will report that as soon as the information becomes available.

Gregory said the value of making all these datasets available to the public, as well as to county and city governments in the state, can’t be overstated.

“When the data begins to touch the lives of the individual, that’s when it starts to matter,” he said. “What we’re beginning to see is that with GIS coming out of the shadows and into the light, people are going, ‘Hey, this is pretty transformative.’”

Gregory – who has worked with GIS for almost 25 years, since the infancy of the technology – added, “I was kind of crying in the wilderness there for a number of years. … I testified in front of the Legislature, and I said, ‘The most transformative technology today is GIS’ – and it is. ... I think it's just going to be rocket fuel to this really important segment of government.”

Techwire will have more on this story as it develops.

Dennis Noone is Executive Editor of Industry Insider. He is a career journalist, having worked at small-town newspapers and major metropolitan dailies including USA Today in Washington, D.C.