Coordinating Development and Use of Geographic Information Databases

This is a 12 month award for research coordinated with a project at the University of Illinois under the direction of Zorica Nedovic-Budic (see Award IRI-9630419). The aim of this research is to begin to formally identify and verify factors and processes influencing government agencies' sharing of geographic information across organizational boundaries, both with other departments within the organization, and between organizations. The project particularly focuses on the behavioral and organizational factors that can facilitate or inhibit the free flow of geographic information. A further goal is to model the decision process by which key actors and decisionmakers determine whether they will or will not share such information, and to describe the practice of sharing. This work is a substantial step toward a realistic and useful model of the information sharing process of agencies that would benefit from free information exchange but to-date have been loathe to make their data available to other parties.