Last month cell phone tower programming errors were responsible for misrouting 911 calls from lost hiker Megumi Yamamoto in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains near Santa Fe, NM.
The problem was quickly corrected, however, the hiker’s calls went to a non-emergency, administrative line in the Santa Fe County Emerrgency Communications Center. Since the calls were not going through the 911 emergency dispatch line, emergency responders were unable to track her location. Ultimately, her call was transferred to a state police emergency dispatcher and a rescue effort was started. The transfer to the state police dispatcher took place about 6 minutes after the first 911 call.
Ironically, the rescue state police helicopter crashed shortly after picking Yamamoto up, killing her and another crew member. The pilot survived, and the crash is under investigation.

A couple of weeks ago, the White House issued a press release announcing Data.gov, a portal whose purpose it is “to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government.” The site offers some tools for transportation and the U.S. Census Bureau, National Weather Service, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office datasets, Energy Informatin Administration datasets and more. The concept behind it is to allow the American people better access and use of government-generated data, which the government hopes will result in more interaction and new ideas from citizenry.

Hopefully this data will be available via popular search engines, which will certainly make its use more widespread. At this time, however, the site appears to be most useful to government agencies requiring information from other government agencies.

Data.gov is part of President Obama’s Open Government initiative.

It would seem that GIS is positioning itself in Washington, with two recent news stories to that effect:

DigitalGlobe announced the resignation of Judith McHale from its board of directors, effective as of May 26, 2009. Ms. McHale joined DigitalGlobe’s board of directors in July 2008 and is resigning to accept the position of Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. Ms. McHale’s resignation was expected by the Company.

President Obama nominated Ms. McHale to the post of Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs on April 14, 2009, and the Senate recently confirmed her nomination. Ms. McHale was sworn in on May 26, 2009 and will assume her duties supporting Secretary Clinton and the State Department immediately.

While it is exciting that the President nominates someone from the geospatial industry, it is also very apt. Companies such as DigitalGlobe were developed to provide commercial satellite imagery, funded by the government, so it stands to reason that there would be a flow of energies between the two entities.

Google’s Washington presence keeps growing, by Gautham Nagesh, June 2, 2009, NextGov — Internet search giant Google has been steadily increasing its presence in Washington as the company seeks to capture a larger share of the federal market for information technology products and services. Google officials discussed the company’s increasing involvement in the government space at an event on Tuesday.