"[Each] field tends to be very closed in the way it deals with data and because of privacy concerns and a lot of other thingss there's no standardization. And that's a critical vulnerability for the country. The lack of a history and culture of data sharing . . . is going to be a tough nut for the country to crack."

During the WTC crisis, data issues (such as quality, access, use, sharing, security, standards) far outweighed technology problems, and they were (and remain) harder to solve. Data about all physical and social aspects of society are collected and used by myriad public and private organizations. But most of this information is captive within individual programs and held closely within organizational boundaries. It is captured and organized in program-specific ways using different, sometimes idiosyncratic, definitions, formats, and rules. Overall, government needs a high-level overview and understanding of the information needs of various domains. But it lacks even a rudimentary inventory of data sources that would at least reveal overlaps and gaps in needed knowledge. We are still very far from fulfilling the often-repeated need to agree on data standards, quality controls, and information sharing protocols that reflect the idea of a broad national information infrastructure in which data from one place or organization meshes with and complements, rather than conflicts with or duplicates, data from others. Standards for data elements and presentation formats, quality controls, analytical tools, and meta data were often cited as the necessary, but often missing, underpinnings of shared and flexible data resources.

The potential benefit of a shared data infrastructure is best illustrated by the pivotal role played by geo-spatial analysis in the response and recovery efforts. The effectiveness of this effort rested on years of development in terms of working relationships, data standards, information sharing agreements, operational adjustments, and trust building involving scores of organizations both inside and outside government. Despite the obvious successes, however, interviewees often noted how poorly we understand the physical infrastructures that underlie our quality of life and the ways in which they are interconnected and vulnerable to cascading failure. These infrastructures cannot be built, maintained, or protected without a more explicit understanding of their detailed condition, overlapping features, and change over time. These needs call for better understanding and ongoing investments in spatial data development and analysis programs to support municipal, metropolitan, regional and wider purposes. Respondents often referred to the possibilities of making similar investments in the data resources that support public health reporting, environmental monitoring, human services, telecommunications, and other areas.