Esri renews NTIS partnership supporting white house priorities with access to geographic data
Andrew Turner of Esri
The Biden administration has prioritised goals relating to climate change, equity, and infrastructure, particularly with the signing of a $1.2 trillion (€1.17 trillion) bill to rebuild America’s aging infrastructure. To take action on many of these initiatives requires access to accurate geographic data while ensuring transparency for all the organisations involved.
To support these goals, Esri, the global specialist in location intelligence, has renewed a joint venture partnership with the US Department of Commerce’s National Technical Information Service (NTIS). The agreement supports innovative joint venture projects throughout the federal government to make data more accessible and transparent.
“Within the past several years, we’ve seen an increased need for organisations to respond to and recover from crises ranging from wildfires to a global pandemic,” says Andrew Turner, director and CTO at Esri R&D Centre in Washington, DC. “By using geospatial technology to access and understand valuable data, leaders can help build resiliency in their communities and make more equitable decisions.”
NTIS helps federal agencies make better decisions about data by providing the support and structure that helps partners securely store, analyse, sort, and aggregate data in new ways. Through the Joint Venture Partnership (JVP) program, NTIS leverages its private sector partners’ knowledge to create new ways of using data to solve problems.
Esri technology is helping government organisations take a geographic approach to solving complex issues that often reach a national and global scale. When the COVID‑19 pandemic was detected, many governments used Esri maps to enable leaders and residents to visualise where the virus had spread and, eventually, where vaccines were available. These same tools are being used to track natural disasters, assess climate risk, and identify areas where policy inequities are occurring.
Expanding partners’ access to open-source data will allow deeper and greater collaboration among government agencies and ultimately improve how they respond to the needs of the public. The renewal of the agreement between Esri and NTIS serves to foster innovation and develop better decision-making in the areas that the White House has prioritised.
To learn more about how Esri technology can be used by the national government to advance access to actionable geographic data, visit here.
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