U.S. Department of the Interior
Office of the Secretary

Mary Helen Thompson (202)208-6416


For Release: September 11, 1996

Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt presented the 14 federal agencies represented on the Federal Geographic Data Committee with Vice President Al Gore's Hammer Award today at Interior Department headquarters in Washington, D.C. The group was honored for its vision and efforts toward creating a national, readily accessible source of accurate geospatial data.

The Hammer Award is Vice President Al Gore's special recognition for contributions in support of the President's National Performance Review Principles. Those principles are: putting customers first, cutting red tape, empowering employees, and getting back to basics. The award consists of certificates signed by Gore and a $6 hammer with red ribbon, which is the Vice President's answer to the $600 hammer of yesterday's government. The award recognizes new standards of excellence achieved by teams helping to reinvent government. More than 350 Hammer Awards have been presented to teams comprised of federal, state and local employees, and citizens who are working to build a better government.

Babbitt recognized the FGDC participants for the "progress we've made to date in an initiative that has involved hundreds of dedicated Federal employees working cooperatively with their counterparts in the states, at the local level of government, in academia and in the geospatial technology industry." Member agencies of the FGDC are: U.S. Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Energy, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, State and Transportation, the Environmental Protection Agency, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Library of Congress, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Archives and Records Administration and Tennessee Valley Authority. Babbitt serves as Chairman of the FGDC.

"In a time of scarce resources, you have leveraged the capabilities of many types of organizations to provide the American people with better, more accessible, and more affordable data," Babbitt said.

Vice President Gore called for the creation of a National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) in the report of the National Performance Review. President Clinton created the NSDI through Executive Order in April, 1994, and charged the FGDC with federal leadershipp for its established Federal and state agencies and other organizations that annually spend billions of dollars producing geospatial data. Better coordination to avoid costly duplication, plus the establishment of common standards, have resulted in significant time and cost savings. The National Spatial Data Infrastructure is unique in that it is a truly cooperative effort, involving not just the federal agencies that make up the FGDC, but state and local governments, the private sector, and academia. These organizations have formed networks of relationships to move the concept of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure forward through four major initiatives:

* The National Geospatial Data Clearinghouse allows data producers and users to share geospatial data across the Internet.

* Partnerships have been established to facilitate cooperative data sharing among federal, state and local governments, non-profit agencies and private companies.

* Data producers from all levels of government are cooperatively building a national distributed framework of common data themes, such as transportation, hydrography (rivers and lakes), geodetic control, digital imagery, government boundaries, elevation and bathymetry, and land ownership.

* "Community-based" standards for themes of data such as vegetation, soils, wetlands, geodetic networks, transportation, and land ownership are also being developed. The FGDC has 12 thematic subcommittees and seven working groups that involve more than 400 federal and non-federal participants. More than 700 users each day access the FGDC home page for information about sharing geospatial data. There are more than 500 individuals who regularly discuss data sharing issues on the Internet discussion list NSDI-L, and more than 5,000 individuals subscribe to the FGDC newsletter. A search by popular Internet search engines for information about geospatial data produces hundreds of hits from all over the country.

The FGDC home page can be accessed at . -DOI-