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first published week of: 08/05/2019
This year’s recipient of the annual award is the Homeland Infrastructure Foundation-Level Data community for support of the 2017 hurricane season. Leveraging the GeoPlatform shared service, the HIFLD community collaboratively delivered geospatial data and services to communities and first responders to help minimize and recover from hurricane impacts.
The HIFLD open data portal, established through the GeoPlatform shared service, provides national foundation-level geospatial data within the public domain that can be used to support community preparedness, resiliency, research and more. The HIFLD open-data portal also enables the dissemination of more than 300 publicly accessible Homeland Security Infrastructure Program data products and web services. Since its inception in February 2016, this HIFLD open-data portal has been used by more than 35,472 users with more than 31,695 data downloads.
In response to hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria, HIFLD members worked collaboratively to provide a centralized site, using GeoPlatform.gov, to host unclassified, publicly available geospatial data, applications, tools and web services. HIFLD4Irma, which was also used to support Hurricane Maria, and HIFLD4Harvey served as authoritative sources of geospatial data and services to 12,850 users with more than 2,920 downloads in a little over 30 days of being established.
These portals became an authoritative source of relevant data for use by local, state, federal, tribal, private-sector and community partners. They served as a hub to aggregate and disseminate open data to support the mapping activities for hurricane response and recovery. This first-of-its-kind type of operational response by HIFLD has been met with great enthusiasm and direct positive feedback from the Executive Office of the White House, Federal Emergency Management Agency, and boots-on-the-ground first responders.