A state House debate over the creation of an oversight committee to monitor the fast-growing field of geographical mapping systems could present some advantages for local and county government.
A bill currently being discussed in the Pennsylvania State House of Representatives could act as a helpful supplement to State College's current geospatial information systems (GIS), said Curtis Thomas, chairman of the House Intergovernmental Affairs Committee, where the bill is currently being debated. GIS is a system for capturing, storing, analyzing and managing data that are spatially referenced to the earth.
According to GIS.com, there are several ways GIS is used by government agencies.
For example, Emergency Medical Services (EMS) responses can be mapped, telling EMS supervisors how efficient their deployment is. According to the Web site, Bank of America used GIS to map bank locations against different levels of income areas.
At Monday's State College Borough Council meeting, State College Police Chief Tom King said GIS is used to map crime activity geographically, allowing police departments to assign officers according to higher concentrations of crime.
Brady Stroh, director of the Center for GIS at Penn State Harrisburg, said he thought the potential committee was a good idea because of "the need for coordination and collaboration."
"There's no regulation and no control," he said. "This new council would not do that either, but it would set standards."
Tim Grattan, State College information technology director, said the borough is already working with a common standard in mind, adding that the borough works closely with a number of people who are GIS experts.
Grattan also said the borough works with Centre County to make its respective systems compatible, since much of the information they store is the same.
Even though the borough has already implemented much of what the committee would seek to do, he said State College will eventually benefit from its creation.
"Over the long term, we will [benefit]," he said. "There's not a lot of short-term benefits to something like this."
Stroh said the committee would help in the future if the borough ever needed to share information with national and state agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security.
Thomas said the bill was not far enough along to begin speculating about potential membership, but one source could be the Penn State GIS Council. Stroh said many people on the council are qualified to be a member.
"Penn State is probably one of the leading universities in terms of geospatial information," he said.
