I'm somewhere in between poster #4 and single private company commercializing and controlling access to a national parcel mapping dataset. I think Local Govs absolutely need to remain in control of their cadastral data, with States & Feds determining how the aggregated products are treated - rather than the private sector. The private sector can certainly play a role in providing hosted data access, as a contractual service, as long as they play by rules that the collective creators/stewards/maintainers of the data determine.

I'm with Mr. Kirkpatrick, in that if the private sector wants to become better "corporate citizen and partner" in this area, they might offer to assist with a little funding for some of the effort. One key to making this really work would be some “community owned & operated” data transformation & aggregation tools to facilitate creating a seamless parcel fabric at the State & National levels. Some important criteria for these tools would include:

a) Be desktop based, well documented & easy to use. State & Local Gov Agencies wish to retain some control of how their data is transformed. Not very many Counties will want to upload their full source data into "the cloud" somewhere and hand off all control over how it is presented/processed.

b) No commercial software licensing issues. Are freely available for all Gov Agencies, regardless of the size of their shop or their budget (or lack thereof). Open Source all the code too - so anyone can contribute improvements.

c) Adhere to open and established standards (both OGC and other Int. Stds.)

d) Make the data available in non-proprietary spatial data formats. Should be a completely open, published format that any GIS software can be made to read & write. No strings attached. Yes, we know, work still needs to be done in this space....

I do agree partially with post #4, in that I don't think the private sector should be making massive profits off an aggregated national parcel dataset - because the data has already been paid for with hard-earned citizen’s property tax money, and it belongs to them. I’m fine with a certain amount of profitability for the private sector for providing hosting services – but not profiteering.

What we need is a group of highly skilled, innovative geospatial organizations (NGOs and Universities count here too) with grid/cloud computing resources and a true commitment to open standards to work with the Feds on this. We need high performance parcel data hosting services at national and regional levels. Many State & Local Agencies just don’t have the necessary bandwidth to be able to host much more than a data traffic jam.

As for how these contracts would be allocated, well, I am not in favor of only one or two huge Federal contracts automagically being handed to the "the usual 900-lb corporate gorillas" without a completely open and transparent bidding process. I'd much rather see a small collection of skilled geospatial "entities" of varying sizes and types engaged around the nation to provide data hosting, software, and analytic web services. Including the smaller players who tend to be more innovative and agile will spur competition and produce better results. A "monocutural monopoly" is not what we need more of right now.

State & Local Gov Associations/Organizations (NACO, IAAO, URISA, NSGIC, etc.) would need to have a fair level of input and oversight in the design the terms of the contracts, particularly pertaining to what the private sector can and cannot do with their data. They would also need a seat at the table during the scoring and contract awards process. All proposal scoring criteria should be made public with the solicitation notice, and full scoring results for all the bidders should also be made public afterward.

In order to be the most useful, these proposed national parcel data and analytic services would need to remain freely accessible to staff at all levels of government (city, county, regional, state, tribal, federal). The last thing we need is another productivity bottleneck where only 1 or 2 people in each organization are allowed to have free access. I would also like to see the data and the basic analytic services remain freely accessible to educational institutions, private citizens, and NGOs.

If the hosting entities can make a modest and reasonable profit off providing high volume access or ease of use functionality to other commercial entities, then that’s fine - as long as there are controls in place that ensure that the data remains affordable and accessible to even the smallest businesses. Maybe some graduated pricing levels. Maybe “start-ups” should even get free access while they are in a "business incubation" status. It also wouldn’t be a bad idea if a small percentage of the profits went back to the original data providers, based on data usage metrics. I don’t think you will find many County government property mapping shops that would turn down a little bit of supplemental funding

Free "citizen access" to county parcel mapping applications is often limited to just looking at a picture (map) of the data or downloading only the tabular part of the data in a spreadsheet. Citizens should have full access to the data - in the form of maps to look at, as well as the ability to download and use the data itself, however they wish, on their own computers. After all, their property taxes paid for it and it is their data. The hosting companies would be getting paid by the Feds to provide data access services, not to sell the data back to the taxpayers & government agencies who already own it. In this instance, "Good Old American Capitalism" probably needs to take a seat on the "seamless parcels bus" behind the citizens and their government’s ability to access and use what most of us consider to be a critical national spatial data resource.

yes, I know it was a long post, but since there is typically no opportunity for the average Local/State Gov GIS professional to share their ideas in the venues where decisions of this nature are made, I decided to share mine here, as a small contribution to the "honest national debate". Thanks for reading.

Now, who else has other thoughts & ideas to share?

We might as put get them all out in the open here, so the handful of people who will end up deciding what direction this goes can have the opportunity to see what people across the entire GIS Community really think about it....