The White House has contracted with a major developer of mapping software to merge a federal website that publishes geospatial information with Data.gov, the government's depot for downloadable data sets, the company's president said on Thursday.

California-based ESRI began last summer tying Data.gov to Geodata.gov, the geospatial information gateway, said company President Jack Dangermond in an interview with Nextgov.

He said he expects Geodata.gov's map services, which enable Web-based applications from different sources to communicate with each other, to be available on Data.gov within two months. When the synchronization is complete, the new content on Data.gov will benefit not only Web developers who mix government data with outside data sources to find trends, but also nontechnical individuals. Anyone will be able to create mashups on the free website ArcGIS.com, which ESRI launched on Saturday.