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.