It’s been a few months since we last posted anything. We’ve been busy contacting all of the assessors in Washington State and working with the GIS staff member and/or public request staff member to sort out the details for data requesting, sharing, and more. It’s been quite an educational experience; we’ve learned more about county-maintained parcel data and assessment procedures and data storage methods than we ever expected to know! Luckily, it’s a fascinating world and we are happy to be learning so much.
For the most part, the cooperation from the counties is wonderful. Most are very receptive to working together to build a statewide parcel layer that can be shared with other public agencies and organization, recognizing that sharing data requests and transfers could greatly reduce costs and time.
As the end of the year rapidly approaches, we are happy to report that we have data from 36 counties; we are still working on requesting and acquiring data from 3 more counties.
We started using Safe Software’s FME (http://www.safe.com/products/desktop/overview.php) to transform the various data formats into one common format. We are amazed by how easy it is to document the process and to make changes to a method in a matter of minutes. This tool is an amazing addition to our work.
Currently, we are working on building the crosswalks to a normalized data set and continuing to document our progress (all the way from the initial data requests to detailed data processing steps). We will be contacting the counties once the initial data layer is built to further investigate the data sharing methods and applicability.
Happy New Year!