Government Computer News takes a look at how GIS is being integrated at local, state and federal levels.  The article takes a particularly close look at Virtual Alabama which uses Google Earth to make mapping and data access available to state and local agencies.   At the federal level, the U.S. Geological Survey and Department of Homeland Security are profiled for their data integration efforts.  The article points out that the biggest hurdle in integrating data across different government levels is participation by local and regional entitities:

“It is nearly always the case that the data that is maintained on a daily basis at the local level is more accurate and can be more timely if it is fed into the right system and maintained across the Web,” said Duewell, Missouri’s senior GIS specialist. He cited the case of a phantom church in Missouri’s dataset. “It is in the federal datasets. It is in the state datasets. But it has been gone for 13 years. It is a parking lot now.”

The article only looked at integration efforts among public agencies.  A good follow up would be looking at the efforts of Google (such as their Google Transit program) and other efforts to increase data collaboration.

Read more: GIS goes vertical, with integration across state, local, federal lines – Government Computer News