HIFLD Next: Restoring America’s Infrastructure Datasets
Public Environmental Data Partners and Fulton Ring are proud to unveil a new community-shaped hub for browsing, previewing and downloading a variety of public GIS data, including an archive from the Homeland Infrastructure Foundation-Level Data (HIFLD). Nicknamed HIFLD Next, our portal launches with a collection of more than 400 infrastructure- and resilience-related data layers that the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) used to curate and share with the public on its now-defunct HIFLD Open data portal.
Built with open source and open collaboration in mind, our portal tackles data preservation challenges of the present and future. With HIFLD Next, we’ve rebuilt tooling to access a resource that leaders across sectors long used to protect communities and their infrastructure from environmental, weather and public-safety threats, including hurricanes Maria and Irma. Tomorrow, our portal’s data collections and features will evolve based on input from users and stakeholders. That reflects how HIFLD Open rose to prominence in the first place: piece by piece, discussion by discussion, from the bottom up.
This project has been collaborative and additive from the beginning. Last fall, our friends at the Data Rescue Project (DRP) released a HIFLD Open data snapshot on DataLumos, which offered downloads in formats like Shapefile and GeoJSON. We sourced the 400-plus data layers and associated metadata in our HIFLD Next collection from there. With our new tooling, in HIFLD Next, users can search these layers, preview them in map or table form, and download them in even more geospatial file formats (GeoPackage, GeoParquet and PMTiles).
But we’re not stopping there. Infrastructure constantly changes, so the data describing it has to change, too. We’re proud to work with DRP’s GIS librarians and data-stewardship experts to maintain, validate and update HIFLD Next’s data layers, helping build and maintain trust among users.
From HIFLD Open to HIFLD Next
HIFLD Next’s origins begin, obviously, with the very story behind HIFLD Open. After 9/11, leaders tasked with making America more resilient to disasters and emergencies saw a glaring vulnerability: They didn’t know for sure where the country’s “critical infrastructure” actually was.
Data and maps of critical infrastructure—things like hospitals, nursing homes, power substations, wastewater treatment plans and administrative/district boundaries—were everywhere and nowhere. Its users exchanged files on email chains or DVDs, or stored them on internal, siloed machines. The data also weren’t consistently formatted, named, structured or documented.
That had to change. Federal civil servants and contractors (a “coalition of the willing,” according to Bill Dollins, one of the contractors) started tracking down data and maps from numerous government agencies. As their efforts progressed, they devised conventions for structuring, naming and formatting the data layers.
The curated, standardized data collection that these efforts yielded became the cornerstone of the HIFLD program, which published, managed and updated the data. Using an Esri-based interface, the HIFLD Open portal offered the public a subset of this data (with more security-sensitive layers hosted on the nonpublic HIFLD Secure).
Finally, everyone was on the same page—and the same map. Emergency managers could coordinate faster to stage resources and evacuate residents before hurricanes and wildfires. Resilience planners could more strategically target adaptation investments, such as structural retrofits and flood levies.
HIFLD Open had its share of shortcomings. Some of its layers, such as its “Hospitals” layer, didn’t receive enough updates, eventually going stale. Nonetheless, HIFLD Open served a critical function: it made life-saving data slightly more “FAIR”—they were quicker to find, use and share.
In the end, Project Geospatial’s Adam Simmons notes, when DHS shut down HIFLD Open, the public lost not only access to data, but also a once-pioneer in federal data sharing, coordination and trust building, one that grew out of an arduous, collaborative, iterative process.
Dollins argues that HIFLD Open data archives and tools will benefit from enduring similarly arduous trials. It’s a challenge we embrace as we launch and improve HIFLD Next.
Get Involved and Help Shape the Future of HIFLD Next
Your contributions and feedback will power HIFLD Next’s future, allowing us to broaden its data catalog, enhance its interface, add new features, or raise awareness of its most impactful use cases. To help us do that, we invite you to try it out and share your feedback and use cases with us. We also invite organizations and individuals who care about our work to contribute datasets, tutorials, expertise and other resources.
Ultimately, HIFLD Next presents an opportunity for civil society to chart a new path forward on the future of data for the public good. It’s open data infrastructure for open infrastructure data and beyond. It’s for the community, by the community. Let’s work together to get there.
HIFLD Next couldn’t have launched without insights, input and contributions from community members like you. Donations from individuals, in particular, have given PEDP more flexibility, allowing us to move fast in order to preserve threatened datasets or deploy new tools when communities need them. Please consider donating to continue supporting this vital work.
