The State Cartographer’s Office along with the Wisconsin Department of Administration received a “Special Achievement in GIS” award from Esri this week at the Esri International User Conference in San Diego. This award acknowledges organizations that use GIS to improve the world and set new precedents throughout the GIS community. The award recognizes the work done on the V1 Statewide Parcel Project.
The V1 Statewide Parcel Project created a statewide GIS parcel database for Wisconsin aggregated from existing county and municipal parcel datasets. The statewide database was made available to the public through a web application and file geodatabase download. The database includes information on property tax assessment, market value, zoning, addresses, acreage, and other characteristics. The V1 Project also focused on: recommendations for a searchable format for parcel attributes; benchmarks to assess completeness of parcel data; quantitative assessments of parcel datasets in terms of these benchmarks; tools to standardize parcel datasets; and recommendations for a data export standard to facilitate integration into a statewide database.
The V1 Project was initiated by Wisconsin Act 20, the state budget for 2013-2015, which created statutory directives for state and local governments to coordinate on the development of a statewide digital parcel database. The Wisconsin Department of Administration, through the Wisconsin Land Information Program housed within the Division of Intergovernmental Relations, was directed to lead the parcel database implementation plan.
The V1 Project is part of a multi-year collaborative effort between the of the Wisconsin Department of Administration, the Wisconsin State Cartographer’s Office, and Wisconsin’s local governments. It is these local governments who build, develop and maintain the state’s parcel data. Every one of Wisconsin’s 72 counties (and four municipalities maintaining separate digital parcel data) cooperated on the V1 Project, producing a final database containing 3.34 million parcels.
The availability of a public statewide parcel database sets Wisconsin apart from most other states that have not compiled a similar online resource. Work on the statewide database in Wisconsin will continue for several more years to develop enhancements to the initial V1 database and streamline the integration process through the adoption of data standards and protocols.
Co-leads on the V1 Project were Peter Herreid (Department of Administration) and Howard Veregin (State Cartographer’s Office). Project coordination and technical leadership was provided by Codie See and David Vogel (State Cartographer’s Office), and Davita Veselenak and Jim Giglierano (Department of Administration). Other State Cartographer’s Office team members included Jim Lacy, AJ Wortley, and Brenda Hemstead. State Cartographer’s Office student assistants on the V1 Project included Patrick Donahue, Renee Rollman, Chris Scheele, and Samuel Schumacher. The project was made possible through the cooperation and assistance of Wisconsin’s county Land Information Offices and GIS staff.
More information on the 2016 SAG Awards can be found here.