GIS the Big Winner in Push for Open Government

[Commentary] For all the lofty statements made during the first day of the Gov 2.0 Summit, about opening up government and its vast reservoirs of data to improve democracy and citizen engagement, it was clear there would be one major winner: GIS. The math is simple. According to the U.S. Office of Management and Budget's Federal Enterprise Architecture framework, 74 percent of government data is location based. At the state and local level, the number is even higher: 80 percent, according to several organizations and publications. The summit's program co-chair, Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media Inc., gives two major reasons why government must be viewed as a platform: The public sector built two of the most important digital infrastructures: the Internet and GPS. "The government built these platforms and the private sector ran with them," he concluded. Just as important is the fact that government has also become a major beneficiary of both platforms.