March 29

Contents

Editor's Introduction

This week I report on the GIS Certification Institute (GISCI), which certifies "GIS professionals" (GISPs) and interview the organization's executive director, Scott Grams. I also point out three GIS-related items in the news and bring you my usual dose of press releases.

—Matteo

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GIS Professional Certification

An alphabet soup of organizations promote geospatial technology and protect the interests of geospatial companies and professionals—including AAG, ACSM, ASPRS, GITA, MAPPS, NCEES, NSGIC, UCGIS, and URISA. A few years ago, at the request of GIS practitioners, URISA—later joined by AAG, NSGIC, and UCGIS—developed benchmarks and a process to certify GIS professionals (GISPs) and it set up an organization to administer the program—the GIS Certification Institute (GISCI), whose mission is "To maintain the high standards and integrity of the GIS profession and promote ethical conduct within it." Since the GISCI program went "live" at the beginning of 2004, the number of GISPs has grown rapidly and has now reached about 1,450. (To apply, see here.) I recently discussed GISCI's history and goals with its executive director, Scott Grams, and attended his presentation on the subject at GITA's annual conference.

The idea of GIS professional certification had been discussed for decades, Grams says, and was detailed in a 1993 article by Nancy Obermeyer for the URISA Journal . A few years later, respondents to a URISA membership survey overwhelming endorsed professional certification as a priority and in 1997 the organization created a certification committee, first chaired by Obermeyer, to look into the feasibility of creating a certification program. The committee first looked at the idea of developing an examination, but could not agree on content, so it stalled.

In 2001, three members of the committee—William Huxhold, Karen Kemp, and Lyna Wiggins—stripped the notion of a GIS professional to its core, Grams writes, and developed the following benchmarks:

1. Educational achievement: a combination of formal university GIS-related coursework and informal GIS-related training / educational conference experience.
2. Professional experience: four years in GIS application and/or data development (or equivalent).
3. Contributions to the profession: modest involvement with publications, professional associations, conference participation, workshop instruction, awards, etc.
4. Code of ethics: appropriate and ethical guidelines for professional practice and conduct.
5. Recertification: a certification cycle that requires further earned credit in the benchmark areas to ensure proficiency.

The challenge, Grams explains, was finding an alternative to an examination that would allow professionals to document that they had achieved these benchmarks. The committee met frequently for more than two years. While, at first, it weighted education equally with experience, it eventually decided to give more prominence to the latter.

It decided to count attendance at vendor trainings, non-profit workshops, and conferences; base calculations on student activity hours; and allow individuals with unrelated majors to earn points towards GISCI certification, in recognition of the fact that GIS professionals enter the field from a variety of different disciplines.

The experience benchmark, Grams explains, considers the duties that GIS professionals perform at their job, the percent of their job dedicated to those duties, and for how long they have been performing them. All GIS-related professional duties count, regardless of job titles. In awarding points toward certification, the committee eventually chose to recognize three different levels of GIS responsibility, with a bonus level for supervisory experience—the more difficult and challenging the duties, the more the points earned. For added flexibility, it decided that applicants could apportion their workload among the three tiers. For this purpose, GISCI requires applicants to submit a very detailed résumé, as well as letters from supervisors.

To recognize the experience of long-standing GIS professionals who do not meet the education and contribution standards, through the end of 2008 established professionals have the opportunity to obtain certification solely on the basis of their experience. This grandfathering provision, however, does not apply to recertification, which is required for all GISPs every five years. The recertification requirements emphasize contributions to the profession, in seven categories: publications, involvement with professional associations, participation in conferences, giving presentations, teaching workshops, receiving awards, and other GIS contributions.

Prior to certification, all applicants must sign the Code of Ethics, which was approved by the boards of directors of GISCI and URISA in 2003. While it applies to all GIS professionals, it is only enforced for GISPs and violations may result in revocation or suspension of the certification.

Initially, GISCI was going to be a branch of URISA, Grams says. However, given that the certification program benefits the whole geospatial community, it was decided that it would be better to create an independent organization to run it, supported by application fees. Starting last year, all member organizations appoint an equal number of representatives to the institute's board of directors.

Fields with licensure, Grams points out, usually don't have certification programs and, vice versa, fields that do not require state government regulation create certification programs to provide some regulatory process. "GISCI cannot restrict practice. We are simply adding a voluntary, self-regulated check for the profession and the public."

"Unfortunately," Grams continues, "there isn't a great litmus test for when a profession requires a license. In Rhode Island, a lobsterman requires a license. A rule of thumb is that certification endorses expertise, while licensure protects the public from incompetent practice. A licensed profession can prevent incompetent people from working again. A certified profession cannot. However, it can remove the certification credential forcing the person to continue to practice without it." (For an excellent comparison of licensing vs. certification, see this.

Grams also emphasizes that GISCI certification, which is only entering its fourth year of operation, is meant to be evolutionary. By comparison, he points out, it took 40 years between the time the first and last states instituted licensure requirements for civil engineers. "The next step of the evolution is to ratchet up the core-competency requirements. The possible next step after that could be an examination-based system coupled with the portfolio-based system."

To this end, GISCI is now seeking comments from the GIS community and GISPs, through the end of April, on a proposal to fundamentally change the way it certifies GISPs— possibly leading to the development of a GISP examination that would identify a "wider and more defined range of expertise," on the basis of the core competency areas listed in the "Geographic Information Science and Technology Body of Knowledge" recently completed by UCGIS. GISCI is considering modifying its GISP application to include a requirement for applicants to certify that they have the range of knowledge, skills, and abilities listed in that report, through some combination of education and experience. Eventually, GISCI could develop a GISP certification examination based on these standards.

I asked Grams to clarify a few aspects of the certification program.

1. Do you foresee explosive growth in the program? If you do, how will GISCI handle it?

   "We look forward to having more applications than we currently have the staff or volunteers to handle. Right now, the staff performs a cursory review of the applications, to make sure that the math is correct and things like that and then we have a large pool of volunteers who perform the qualitative review. If the number of applications were to explode, we would have to bring on additional personnel for the cursory review, but the pool of volunteer reviewers grows as GISCI grows. Avoiding over-regulation has allowed GIS technology to flourish and seep into secondary and tertiary fields. GISCI has created a program that encourages and stimulates growth while allowing GIS professionals a chance to be recognized for meeting some basic requirements."

2. Are all of the reviewers GISPs themselves?

   "Yes, they are."

3. How will the certification process evolve to keep up with changes in the technology and in the mix of practitioners?

   "We are trying to incorporate more and more of the UCGIS body of knowledge into the program. Although the technology may change, those core principles will remain the same. GISCI has the most rigorous recertification guidelines in its field or related fields. Individuals need to continue to re-educate themselves to earn additional experience points. To earn contribution points, they also have to be interacting with the community, keeping up on the changes in the technology. We'd rather have fewer GIS professionals than to certify people who really only have a cursory knowledge of the technology."

4. A business analyst, say, who increasingly relies on GIS and starts to attend professional GIS conferences will move toward the GIS community, as opposed to you having to reach out to her…

   "Yes, exactly. We want those people to also take courses, workshops, or trainings in some of those core competencies. We want to make sure that they are getting more of a background, rather than just hands-on keyboard use."

5. Do you envision states beginning to license GIS professionals?

   "States are probably going to try to develop programs if it becomes a viable source of revenue for them. The work that a GIS professional does is very different from that of a licensed surveyor. We look at the NCEES model law as a base and we are asking GIS professionals to only work within their sphere of knowledge and education. If they don't, we could possibly remove their GISP credential or, through our ethical procedures, we could censure them."

6. This process does nothing to evaluate how good someone is at GIS.

   "We feel that the three-part evaluation process and having a portfolio vetted tells us whether or not this person is competent. However, just because a person meets our qualifications does not mean that they are going to be competent in every single situation. Neither licensure nor certification is going to prevent someone from making a mistake. The role of each is to ensure that minimum qualifications exist on the front end and a method for dealing with mistakes exists on the back end."

7. This process could induce some managers to help applicants stretch the truth, so that their company could advertise that it has GISPs…

   "We take that into account. We will also contact an employer's HR department and make sure that the dates and titles of employment listed on the application are correct. In certain instances, at the request of the review committee, we will send portions of the professional profile section of the application to past supervisors and have them verify it as well. We are also asking our certificate holders to aspire to a higher ethical practice. Personally, I feel that one of the strongest points of GISCI is its ethical guidelines. GISPs are putting their credentials on the line every single time they have a professional interaction and there are ramifications to their actions."

Briefly Noted

Runway Mapping Device

According to the New York Times ("F.A.A. Calls for Runway Mapping Device," by Matthew L. Wald, 2007 March 24), the Federal Aviation Administration, in response to recent accidents and near-accidents, has asked the aviation industry to "design a device for the cockpit of a plane that shows the plane's position on an airport map to help pilots avoid becoming confused and using the wrong runway or taxi-way." Wald writes that according to the F.A.A. administrator, Marion Blakey, a moving map display, "could help drive down the number of cases of 'runway incursion,' in which a plane is in potential conflict with another plane, truck, car, or other vehicle." The National Transportation Safety Board, Wald writes, "has called for development of a system that would warn pilots of impending collisions on the ground. But the aviation agency says that is beyond reach for now because it would require knowing the intentions of planes at the airport. So it is seeking development of a device intended only to show each crew its own position, and not the position of other planes."

Threatened by Rising Sea Levels

According to a study in the current issue of the journal Environment and Urbanization and reported on National Public Radio, 634 million people (roughly ten percent of the world's population) live in areas near the coast and with elevations less than 30 feet above sea level—making them vulnerable to the rise in sea level that is going to accompany global warming. The 10 countries with the most people in the low coastal areas are China, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Indonesia, Japan, Egypt, the United States, Thailand, and the Philippines. Two-thirds of world's largest cities — cities with more than five million people—are at least partially in these low areas. Some low-lying places will be more at risk than others because of weather patterns and geography.

Location, location, location

One of the biggest news stories of the week, Iran's seizure of 15 British sailors on March 23 in the waters of the northern Persian Gulf, hinges, ostensibly, on the exact location of the seizure: did it take place inside Iraqi waters, as the Royal Navy claims, or about a half a mile inside Iranian waters, as the Iranian authorities claim? Alan Cowell, in today's New York Times, writes: "The Royal Navy on Wednesday … took the unusual step of making public charts, photographs and previously secret navigational coordinates to substantiate its claim that the British sailors were 1.7 nautical miles—roughly 2 miles—inside Iraqi waters when they were apprehended at gunpoint and forced into Iranian waters."

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