In support of COVID-19 public health awareness efforts, on March 19, 2020, SharedGeo launched a website where users can visualize the spread of the virus across the U.S. beginning early March of that year. Unique to the map is a time sequence display of county level data made available by primarily using data from University of Virginia’s Biocomplexity Institute’s COVID-19 Surveillance Dashboard and the Coronavirus COVID-19 Global Cases map by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at John Hopkins University.

In making this interface, SharedGeo also hoped to help Decision Makers understand there is a national need for better location granularity in reporting of pandemic related information.  Although by-county reporting is better than the by-state approach still used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, effective decision support visualization will not occur until specificity is delivered on the census tract level or lower.  As an example, it makes no sense to report the entire state of South Dakota as being highly impacted by a contiguous disease outbreak, when in fact the only place in the state experiencing any significant level of transmission is a small area in vicinity of Rapid City.

In addition to several mapping features, the site also hosts graphs which show trends by state or territory.

To view the dedicated website, click the link below:

U.S. Spread of COVID-19 Maps and Analytics

• Sponsor of the 2021 WLIA Annual Conference (virtual), February 15-19, 2021
• Organizing entity, fiscal agent and sponsor for the Minneapolis OSGeo Community Sprint, May 14-17, 2019
• Sponsor of 2018 MN GIS/LIS Consortium Conference, October 3-5, 2018
• Developed, managed and sponsored the 2018 Upper Midwest Geospatial Conference, May 23-24, 2018
• Developed, managed and sponsored the GITA Phoenix Conference, March 5-6, 2018
• Created the 2017 Upper Midwest U.S. National Grid Summit, May 23, 2017
• Developed, managed and sponsored the 2016 Upper Midwest Geospatial Conference, May 24-26, 2016
• Administrative and financial support to Geospatial Technologies for Crisis and Disaster In the Developing World Workshop, Jackson, Mississippi, October 7-9, 2015
• Administrative support to the GITA Geospatially Enabling Community Collaboration (GECCo) workshop, Hanoi, Socialist Republic of Vietnam, November 11 and 12, 2014.
• Sponsored Dr. Carl Reed, Open Geospatial Consortium, at FOSS4G-NA 2013, May 21-24, 2013
• FOSS4G-NA 2013 Conference fiscal and contracting agent, May 21-24, 2013
• Sponsored Minnesota Governor’s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Conference attendee, February 12-14, 2013
• Developed, managed, and sponsored Twin Cities Geospatially Enabling Community Collaboration event, October 27-28, 2011
• Sponsored GeoMOOSE Users/Developers Meeting at FOSS4G, Sept. 14, 2011
• Developed initial GeoMOOSE Project Steering Committee meeting, May 11, 2011
• Sponsored Minnesota/Wisconsin GITA meeting, March 3-4, 2011

In addition to Shared Funding Projects, in March 2022, SharedGeo took on its first Fiscal Sponsorship.  Through this IRS legally defined relationship, SharedGeo is able to extend its IRS tax exempt status to an effort which it believes will evolve into becoming a self-standing nonprofit with a mission inline with that of SharedGeo. The project SharedGeo’s Board of Directors decided to accept for its first Fiscal Sponsorship is the United States National Grid Institute (USNGI).

The mission of the USNGI is: “…to promote awareness and use of the U.S. National Grid standard as the nation’s primary geo-location coordinate system and ‘language of location’ for emergency response, data analysis, asset management and public mapping.”

The USNGI website is currently in development, but when active can be accessed using the link below.  Until then, you can donate to the USNGI by clicking here.

United States National Grid Institute

In response to an issue which has long plagued the geospatial community during the automated production of maps and mapbooks, SharedGeo developed a service which correctly calculates and inserts into these products the Magnetic Declination Diagram (MDD) as each map is being produced.  The MDD is used to orientate a map and compass when they are being used for navigation.  To learn more about this significant technical achievement which SharedGeo makes available for free, visit the service page at the link below:

SharedGeo Magnetic Declination Diagram Service

Given similar missions, SharedGeo has had a long running relationship with the Emergency Preparedness Committee (EPC) of the Minnesota Geospatial Advisory Council – a legally enacted Minnesota state government entity under Minnesota statute 16E.3.  In addition to several individuals being substantially involved in both SharedGeo and the EPC, as needed SharedGeo provides funding and resources to support the EPC.  Some examples include paying for a dedicated Zoom account and web services, and development of a prototype decision support system for the Minnesota public called the Minnesota Situational  Awareness Viewer (MSAV).  The graphic below shows MNSAV.

To learn more:

Click here for the home page of the EPC

Click here for the live version of MNSAV

SharedGeo’s mission “is to help government, nonprofit, education, and corporate entities use mapping technologies and share geographic data for the public good.“

One of the ways SharedGeo is working to fulfill that mission is by serving as a financial and operational hub so that interested stakeholders with a shared goal have a way to contribute financially and technically towards a shared project that benefits the common good.  By pooling limited funds from different organizations, projects can be accomplished that could not be tackled alone.

Donations to these projects are tax deductible to the full extent allowed by law.

Please contact us to learn more, or use the links below if you’d like to contribute to one of our active Shared Funding Projects:

Current Shared Funding Projects

• GeoMoose Project

Previous Shared Funding Projects

• USNG Emergency Location Markers Project
• US National Grid Mashup Project

At the request of the U.S. National Grid user community, in 2011, SharedGeo developed a simple app which shows a user’s location on the federal geolocation standard for emergency response – U.S. National Grid (USNG). Through this effort, the American public gained access to a free, lightweight, agnostic app which can be used to provide an emergency location whenever a street address is not available.

This app is actually a webpage which after being opened the first time in a connected environment no longer requires an internet connection to show USNG location as sensed by the mobile’s GPS chip.  To learn more, click this link to download the informational brochure.

You can get on “the grid” right now by clicking this link, or by simply typing in usngapp.org into the URL browser bar of any mobile.  Provided you allow access to location services and have a reasonable line of sight to the GPS satellites (not in a safe in the basement of a bank), you should be good to go!

IMPORTANT – Although there are reported instances of this app saving lives, before using it in an emergency make sure your local 9-1-1 call center and Emergency Services Sector know how to use this coordinate system.  Regrettably, as related elsewhere on this website, USNG adoption across the U.S. is spotty and currently limited to those communities willing to embrace advancements in technology and national standards.

To facilitate access to geospatial theme focused information during the COVID-19 pandemic, SharedGeo developed a virtual conference booth to mirror the type of educational outreach items which would normally be made available during in-person conferences for the Emergency Services Sector (ESS) or GIS community.  Over the years, SharedGeo has supported these type of events as far afield as Florida and Arizona.  The link to the booth can be found below:

SharedGeo’s Virtual Conference Booth

In the aftermath of the Haiti Earthquake, SharedGeo was called upon to provide automated spatial indexing services for hundreds of pre-processed Military Grid Reference System (MGRS)* enabled map tile PDFs.   These files were generated at the Center for Interdisciplinary Geospatial Information Technologies, Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi, and were continually updated during the recovery process, sometimes as often as four times a day.

These files were named via a standard method, derived from the MGRS.  This approach was used to index and geo-locate each of the PDF tiles to their respective location on the ground.   The tile location polygons were updated by writing a dynamic indexing script that kept track of new files as they were added to the repository for web publication and use in the field.  SharedGeo also took on the responsibility of keeping Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) compliant Web Mapping Services (WMS) and Web Feature Services (WFS) in place thoroughout the recovery to ensure the associated maps were always available.

Consequently, emergency responders on the ground, as well as mapping system developers, were able to overlay this service onto their mapping interfaces so that their “view of the world” was automatically updated as new files were added.  Furthermore, the WMS and the WFS maintained and updated by SharedGeo were used in multiple online and desktop mapping engines that helped in the relief efforts after the earthquake.

*Inside the United States, a modified version of MGRS called U.S. National Grid (USNG) is being promoted as the Emergency Services Sector’s “emergency response language of location”.    Learn more.

During the Republican National Convention (RNC) held in Twin Cities Metro in August and September 2008, the SharedGeo development team worked closely with the Minnesota Wing of the Civil Air Patrol (CAP) to put in place high speed download, conversion and WMS distribution of CAP ARCHER (Airborne Real-time Cueing Hyperspectral Enhanced Reconnaissance) imagery on an as needed basis.  As a result, event planners had web distributed access to near real-time imagery down to 6 inch resolution if circumstances warranted.  This is believed to have been a first in the nation effort during a National Special Security Event (NSSE).

Click on image for expanded view.

After this RNC experience, SharedGeo has continued to research and refine the imagery software and programming that made the original effort possible.  Although CAP has since retired these systems, SharedGeo stands ready to deploy similar collaborative low cost approaches to remote sensing collection when needed by units of government.