Comments on: Tempe, AZ GIS Data – It will cost ya!

By: GIS_John

GIS_John — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 23:10:06 +0000

Rudy,

Does this mean you’d not want cities to join in the national map? It is unfunded of course, but really there isn’t much cities have to do other than provide their data in NSDI/FGDC standards.

By: GIS_John

GIS_John — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 23:04:45 +0000

I’m a little late to this tread, but I think what I’m seeing here is something we all are dealing with around the country.

A city/county/state trying to hold on to the data. Not because they really care too much about “recovering money” but because they don’t understand how things work these days.

Despite what others have said above, Microstation is not an open standard and one we should be sharing data in. CAD is really bad about open formats so I’ve got no real suggestions to them about what to do about this.

OGC would probably tilt toward GML or CityGML for open standards which would be cutting edge for a city like this (assuming they want to change). I know vancouver offers DWG (or soon will) on their open data portal so I suppose it isn’t that much out of the question for Tempe to share theirs as some Bentley format. But the problem is that you’d limit your sharing with companies that had this format which is definitely a subset of even the CAD marketplace.

By: James Fee

James Fee — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 22:38:58 +0000

Rudy and everyone else.

Why make this personal?

Anyway, I never requested to data from Tempe because the restrictions on the data made it impossible. I can’t just take off work and waltz down to the Tempe Engineering department and plop down $100,000 for their data.

By: Anon

Anon — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 22:34:53 +0000

I googled RLS and it returned Restless leg syndrome. I had no idea Rudy…

By: Lefty

Lefty — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 22:33:29 +0000

Ah so this isn’t about open data, but you being a surveyor and us being a zealots.

Amazing how so many cities get this around the world, but your buddies down in Tempe and by extension you don’t.

You want to protect your little world with COGO and other irrelevant concepts. That has nothing to do with what James was asking.

Data for him to present at a GIS Day event.

By: Tom Ponte

Tom Ponte — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 22:30:40 +0000

Hopefully I am not going to repeat points that were already made here and there are a lot of them. It seems to me that if a city makes a onetime upgrade to cogo it’s parcels and whatever database upgrades they may be making to go along with that, that those costs should not be passed on to either commercial or non commercial GIS end users. The vast majority of those parcels will undergo little future change.
As for maintaining the parcels after that, well as far as I know it is pretty standard practice in the modern age to require new developments to be submitted as cad drawings that meet certain standards so they are easy to import in to the existing parcel “fabric”. COGOed tax lots are mostly a benefit for those folks that have to maintain them. Plus any costs necessary to incorporate those parcel changes are added to system development charges that the developer pays.
For many GIS purposes you don’t really need all that great of spatial accuracy for parcels. For example for routing or making a map of all the foreclosed properties. If a property line is 20 feet off it is not going to be a life or death matter. Even if it was a life or death matter say for a 911 call should the GIS community bear the cost of that? Most GIS shops put a disclaimer on even cogo tax lots saying that they are not to be used as survey grade data like a fight between you and your neighbor about where he put his fence.
Which brings up the really odd way the City of Tempe chose to sell the data. If you only needed a quarter mile area then probably you are really wanting to make the kind of decisions that you need plat maps for. Most county governments have those available in a scanned format for free.
The other piece is that database piece which really does need to be accurate for most GIS uses. The thing about this is that there should be no need to pass on these costs to GIS users because the assessment and taxation offices have to maintain this information anyway, always have and always will.
This leaves the trivial cost of disseminating the data which is what it got boiled down to in California.

By: Rudy Stricklan

Rudy Stricklan — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 22:25:43 +0000

Startlingly enough, I do believe that Tempe Engineering’s primary mission is to… Tempe Engineering and its charge to manage certain elements of the City’s utility infrastructure. However, I wouldn’t fret too much that this self-centered view has hampered the Department’s innovative deployment of its geospatial data (albeit in the depressing MicroStation format). In concert with a local architectural firm, the City was just awarded one of EPA’s four national awards for smart growth management in 2009, with its Tempe Transportation Center. The TTC is a multi-use green facility that is not only a transportation hub, but also a gathering spot for the community (http://www.epa.gov/smartgrowth/awards/sg_awards_publication_2009.html). In the early 1990′s, Tempe successfully litigated against neighboring Sky Harbor airport to the tune of a few megabucks, using the GIS data to construct an audio-visual presentation that demonstrated the noise levels at various spots in the City. The Tempe Town Lake was also designed with the aid of that closed-format MicroStation data as well. Maybe ignorance of true innovation as promoted by non-engineers has been bliss for Tempe Engineering.

I’m beginning to suspect that perhaps you’re tweaked because Tempe didn’t realize that the Emperor of the GIS blogosphere was asking for their data, and they deigned to refuse. They have been using this system, with great success, since 1988. Youâ€™ll have to excuse their provincial attitudes in not realizing how giving the data away will directly profit Tempeâ€™s citizenry considerably beyond the benefits they have already enjoyed. I’m not convinced the assertion that authoritative data, released to the open-source world at large, necessarily improves it. But thatâ€™s just me as a measurement professional hick from Arizona. Benefits of GIS have been available long before the crowd-sourced data zealots came on the scene, no matter how well-intentioned those folks are.

If you had any legal standing in your battle with Tempe, youâ€™d have a chance with the pitchforks and torches mob approach, and Iâ€™d support it as I did Bruce Joffe in the Santa Clara County issue in California. As it is, youâ€™re just being antagonistic with a City who doesnâ€™t share your sense of altruism. Dang Tempe and its insular use of its own GIS data!
Brent Jones and Bob Samborski have suggested/offered a national forum to discuss this issue. Iâ€™d love an open-forum discussion format between GITA members and ACSM surveyorsâ€¦ it would flush out a lot of opinions (and canards).

Rudy Stricklan, RLS

By: Bob Samborski

Bob Samborski — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 20:24:36 +0000

I’ve been watching this interaction with great interest. As a non-profit educational association dedicated to promoting the use of geospatial technology – including the sharing of geospatial data – GITA has a vested interest (an obligation, really) in promoting such discussion. We have a few spots left open at the upcoming April conference for exactly such ‘hot topics.’ I would like to invite anyone interested in making a presentation or participating in a panel discussion to contact me and we’ll do our best to make it happen. In addition, we are planning to conduct another in our series of Geospatially Enabling Community Collaboration (GECCo) workshops in the Phoenix area in January. These are workshops designed to augment local/regional collaborative efforts and are focused upon defining barriers to collaboration. Effective data sharing (or lack thereof) is a primary topic. (see http://www.gita.org/ciper/gecco.asp for more info and final reports from the previous 5 GECCos.) The GECCos are offered at no cost to user stakeholders in the area. We will also offer a follow-up GECCo Roundtable during the conference on a complimentary basis for those interested.

Bob Samborski, Executive Director
GITA

By: Ben Reilly

Ben Reilly — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 19:54:25 +0000

I eagerly await the further privatization of local governments. Bring on the private firemen, police forces, and data. That there is just one local government to choose from in a given geographic area is by itself undesirable – lets bootstrap up our own and let the ~~voters~~ consumers decide. I think our police force could bring in a tidy profit by some means, given proper incentives.

By: KipterUh

KipterUh — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 17:18:35 +0000

Cities competing against private industry? Jesus does that scare me. Of course maybe that is why they are selling it for $100k. No competition. Monopoly is more like it Rudy.

Cities shouldn’t be in the data selling business anymore than private industry shouldn’t be in the government industry.

I actually hate Arizona more than I did before. What a bunch of hicks who live there (no offense James).