Can the framework embody the knowledge once possessed by the people?
The framework working group, composed of FGDC staff and representatives from state and local government, was aware that a centralized database, even one collected from high-quality high-resolution local sources, could not succeed. But the suspicion was that organizations all over the country were already producing sets of basic data such as road, hydrography, units of government, etc. that others might need. Through the magic of emerging networking technologies, communities could pool their data and move it electronically into a virtual database. This same technology would allow a user anywhere to touch framework data all over the country.(Federal Geographic Data Committee 1995) But how to convince local communities to take ownership of their piece of framework? Writings about the framework published by the FGDC discussed the technical features of the framework but they also enrolled interest by making a case for the usefulness of the framework and by imagining a new social structure t
