A group of collaborators from the Spatial Decision Support Consortium (SDSC) received a grant in September 2019 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to explore building an "Open Knowledge Network for Spatial Decision Support." The inspiration for this type of network comes from Tim Berners-Lee's (best known founder of the World-wide Web) vision for the "semantic web," which applies tags with relationships to information on the Internet, allowing computers to do basic reasoning for improving search results and answering questions.

The SDS portal is designed to organize and facilitate the access to SDS information, including methods and techniques, technology, case studies, by using an ontology to promote semantic clarity and provide enriched links between resources. 

The GeoDesign Knowledge Portal is being developed to systematically organize the vast body of knowledge and information in the emerging field of GeoDesign, to promote semantic clarity of commonly used terms within the user community, in the areas including GeoDesign process, methods and techniques, technology, case studies, and to facilitate the access of GeoDesign resources.