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| GeoCommunity Mailing List |
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| Subject: | Re: GISList: Cost of GIS Data |
| Date: |
11/19/2002 03:25:10 PM |
| From: |
Robert Heitzman |
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>JeffCO does charge for GIS data. The fees are posted at
>http://ww4.co.jefferson.co.us/cgi-bin/catalog/cat.cgi/search?SEARCH=gis
I guess this thread could become a survey of sorts. My city and county give
their base map and most planning related data away. It is hosted at the
local college which is actively supporting both the City and County with
their GIS efforts:
http://discover.lib.calpoly.edu/GIS/
The City sells aerial photography and RS images as they are restricted from
giving it away in the original contract, not atypical for aerial and RS
images.
Neither publishes parcel data. The City has had parcels used as part of the
planning process for a long time. A walk up kiosk (using MapObjects) offers
parcel (no cost data) level data and many other City documents can be
accessed from that station. As the kiosk is interactive it has not yet been
published on the web.
The State of California should be a good role model for those considering
charging for data. CA originally had a data center dedicated to GIS
activities - Teale Data Center. That offered data mostly on subscription
basis to other agencies and jurisdictions in the state. They had very few
customers and created huge amounts of ill-will in association with the term
"GIS". They never met revenue projections. After some serious battles the
GIS data was eventually extracted from Teale and place on the Internet for
free download.
http://www.gis.ca.gov
Cal State has developed a web based interface for downloading some of the
layers data, mostly DRGs which are in a projection unlike any other in the
US.
For those of your looking for free data the TIGER data from the Census folks
makes a very good base map. Many GIS packages can import TIGER. The TIGER
layers are also available from ESRI/Geography Network in shapefile format.
TIGER's most useful layers are street centerline and water layers. Rail is
also available.
http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/
The Census folks also publish what they call Cartographic data which is
organized by state (TIGER is organized by County). Some useful layers are
Census Designated Places (city, towns, bergs, etc.) areas and County
boundaries.
http://www.census.gov/geo/www/cob/index.html
The National Atlas is also a good source for national level data.
http://www.nationalatlas.gov/
The United Nations Environment Network is a good source for International
data:
http://www.unep.net/
ALL FREE!
My suggestion to jurisdiction GIS managers is to follow any of the examples
above. Base map and planning data should be offered to all for free IMO. The
taxpayer has already paid for the data once, placing copies on a static web
page is the least you can do.
Data you pay outside resources for probably should not be re-sold as long as
it is available to the general public from the same source.
Parcel data is up to debate. It is more a judgment call to be made by
politicians. IMO it should not be sold, it should either be free to all, or
closed to all. "Closed" meaning available under your current policies,
usually map books and maybe a computer terminal looking up one record at a
time.
Our County is struggling with this now. A conversion from text description
to GIS layer is underway under contract. It doesn't look like the GIS layers
(boundaries + parcel number and maybe street and owner address) will be made
available to the public at all with limited distribution to
sub-jurisdictions and regulatory and community services districts. I'm not
positive but I think the contractor doing the conversion has a right to
resell w/o assessor data.
So there's Bob's Cookbook!
Any one else?
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