The federal government’s CIO.gov web site put together what seems like a smart-looking interactive map showing where some 137 federal data centers are slated to be closed or consolidated this year as part of the White House Office of Management and Budget’s announced plans last year to dramatically reduce the number of government data centers.
The map provides two options: View List of Closures (Locations 1) and View Interactive Map (Locations 2). The List of Closures has locations for only 56 of the 137 data centers and the interactive map shows only 36 data centers. So what happened to the remaining data centers?
There are 137 data centers in the data set available for download, but it turns out 81 data centers do not have specific locations (latitude and longitude).
Any map is severely limited, even misleading, by only showing less than half its subjects–in this case, data centers. Certainly some data center’s locations are not provided for security reasons, but at least the reason for so many missing locations should be given.
In addition, when I mouse over the Data Center Location Column, I see the latitude and longitude in parentheses, but the data is not available for use in mapping so I had to manually extract it to Latitude and Longitude columns. I found that two Alaska and two Washington, DC data center locations appear to be in error so readers can have more confidence in the map Locations 2 that I produced than the one produced from the downloaded data set using Locations 1! The two maps can be compared below and interactive versions are provided on a wiki site I maintain for the Semantic Community.
Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative Locations 1-View List of Closures: There are 137 Data Centers in the data set available for download, but 81 Data Centers do not have specific locations (Latitude and Longitude). So any map is severely limited, even misleading, by only showing less than half the Data Centers. In addition this map shows four locations that are clearly wrong.
Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative Locations 2 – View Interactive Map: There are only 36 Data Centers CIO.gov map. This map, similar to the one above, shows the locations of the data centers from the CIO.gov interactive map and does not have the four mis-located data centers in the above map.
The article said: “In the American political conversation, the national debt has become something almost mythical. The debt has become a metaphor for all that ails the United States, a scary monster under the bed. It isn’t. It’s an accounting concept. The nation’s numbers, in the billions and trillions of dollars, start to get away from us quickly. But the challenge is not unlike any household’s juggle to manage its finances.” Keep reading →