Building and Maintaining a Statewide Transportation Framework

Creating and maintaining up-to-date, sharable, geographic information systems–transportation data are challenging. Many states are working on transportation framework efforts to build a complete, consistent, and current transportation data layer in conjunction with the National Spatial Data Infrastructure and Geospatial One-Stop efforts. An effort was made to systematically reexamine transportation data-sharing issues as part of the development of a transportation framework for the state of Washington. Business needs were assessed for spatial and temporal accuracy needs of stakeholders and users of a statewide transportation framework. A conceptual model was developed for a transportation framework with emphasis on data flows to update and maintain it and other transportation databases. An update clearinghouse is proposed to collect and disseminate data about new and modified road features. A synthesis of issues is presented, including determining the desired robustness of the transportation framework and cost-allocation principles for possible add-on enhancements.