public v. private

Interesting back and forth regarding public v. private approaches to maintaining a national cadastre.

We spoke at length with First American Spatial Solutions during the ILRIS project. Boundary Solutions also. FASS seems to have a more practically tuned machine for moving toward total national parcel coverage, and are receptive to public/private development of a 100% Maine mapdown.

Most remarkable in this ongoing debate is that even at this late date no clear, proven course exists to navigate through these difficult waters. Taxpayers still feel taken (and maybe they are) if their locally funded data ends up repackaged for profit in the hands of aggregators. But the data are public, and it is difficult to deny that subjecting them to modern information technology and freeing them from their silos and stovepipes is the right way to go. It sure seems so aesthetically. And it has sure proven to be the case over and over and over again practically.

So maybe it just comes down to the fact that the private aggregators haven't presented an adequate quid pro quo in this area - a "google sop" - which makes the sense of privacy invasion and asset poaching acceptable since the applied technology delivers sufficient utility to offset it.

happy terminalia

Terminus, in Roman mythology, was the god of boundaries and protector of both limits of private property and of the public territory of Rome. He was represented by a stone or post set up in the ground.

On the 23rd of February (the end of the old Roman year) a festival called Terminalia was held in the ancient city and its environs. Owners of adjacent lands assembled around common boundary stones and crowned their sides of the stones with garlands, incense, fruits, honey and wine. Proceedings closed with songs to the god and general merrymaking, in which all members of the family and friends took part.

Any one who removed a boundary stone was accursed and might be slain with impunity; a fine was afterwards substituted for the death penalty.

parcels: where they are

Here's a way to actually pan and zoom around the state to see what the parcels look like, where they are available, where they're not, how they match at the edge of town - that sort of thing. At the moment it only includes towns that have received parcel grants and submitted their data to the GeoLibrary, and UT towns. And it's only being used for generic viewing of geometry with some identifiers included. But it's a start.