Best practices for a statewide state parcel data portal

I have long had great respect for the data portals, coordination, and community of practice in North Dakota, as I first wrote about here. I recently asked my colleague Bob Nutsch, the geospatial program coordinator for North Dakota, to share strategies that I believe will be instructive to the reader–focusing on one data layer in particular that is in high demand and yet presents challenges to coordinate and serve–parcels. Particularly if you are tasked with similar duties in your own organization, consider Bob’s words of wisdom here.

–Joseph Kerski

The goal of the North Dakota State Parcel Program is to maintain an accurate, publicly accessible, maintained, Statewide Parcel Dataset that supports the State of North Dakota business needs. Other beneficiaries of the dataset include local government and businesses. The dataset is maintained by aggregating parcel boundary and tax roll data from each of the state’s 53 counties and/or their vendors.

To minimize impact to county staff and their vendors, the Parcel Program is flexible, providing data contribution options for manual and scripted uploading by the data provider(s) and options for automated harvesting of data by the Parcel Program.

A preferred harvesting option is using the open data portals from the counties and/or their vendor.  Over the past two years that the Parcel Program has been in existence, Bob and his team have seen a marked increase in the number of open data portals utilized by the providers of the parcel boundary data. Advantages of sourcing data from the open data portals include the following:

• Having a familiar REST API saves significant time to our contractor for setting up the Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) for a county that moves from another data sharing method to using an open data portal and associated REST API.
• The familiar interface and functionality make it easy for anyone to view and navigate through the data provided by the county and/or their vendor, assisting in initial set up and subsequent debugging or QA work.
• Less time spent by the county and/or their data provider, e.g., they no longer have to zip up a file geodatabase or shapefile following by manually uploading the dataset.
• The “build it once, use it a bunch” benefit to the county is made possible by the county’s investment to stand up the open data portal to meet their business needs first and foremost, followed by responding to data requests of others such as those associated with the Parcel Program. Years ago, at NSGIC I heard the Arkansas GIO use the “build it once, use it bunch” term for the first time. With the use of open data portals, his description precisely describes open data platforms.
• Open data portals provide the foundational framework and “common language” of seamlessly and easily sharing data amongst public and private entities, first envisioned by the U.S.G.S. National Map years ago.

An example of using an open data portal can be found by accessing the Statewide Parcel Dataset via the Hub Data Portal. The parcel data can be found by browsing within the Land Records theme or by simply searching on “parcels” which then shows the “Parcels TaxRoll” and the “Parcels” map. Clicking on the “Parcels” item allows one to easily view the data.  While in the viewer, one can click on the Download icon to retrieve the data in a variety of formats and geographic extents.  While in the viewer, one can also click on the “I want to use this” button provides a list of options including links to the REST API. That REST API can be used in web applications and in desktop GIS applications (Esri and non-Esri).

If you are using ArcGIS Pro, although you can use the REST API, it’s much easier and quicker to lean on the native capabilities of ArcGIS Pro and simply go to the Catalog view, click on the Portal tab, click on the “ArcGIS Online” button, and then in the “Search ArcGIS Online” text field type in “ndgishub parcels” (you may wish to also apply the “Status – Authoritative” to eliminate clutter).  Once you have added the parcel data to your map (the related tax roll table is included), you can then apply your own symbology, labeling, scales, etc.

–Bob Nutsch

The metadata editor has arrived in ArcGIS Online

As our book and this blog has a major focus on data quality, metadata has always been a topic of these essays. With the summer 2023 release of ArcGIS Online, a metadata editor (beta) was included. This is a streamlined experience for creating high-quality geospatial metadata. This new editor enables you to:

• Quickly complete what’s needed, creating essential metadata compliant with international open standards.
• Complete more robust documentation, including optional metadata elements.
• Search and find metadata elements.
• View, download, and overwrite metadata records.

See my colleagues article for more, on: https://www.esri.com/arcgis-blog/products/arcgis-online/announcements/introducing-metadata-editor-beta/.

First, the administrator for your ArcGIS Online organization needs to enable metadata for the organization. See below for the screen that the administrator will see in this regard.

Enabling metadata editing in an ArcGIS Online organization.

Once done, you, as an owner of content in your organization, can use the metadata editor beta button to create and edit metadata. First, find it by > Contents > Item Details > Metadata > Open in metadata editor beta. Then, document your data by exploring the options and features as shown below.

Furthermore, as a core theme of this blog is how to find geospatial data, and given the widespread usage of ArcGIS Online to serve data, I anticipate the use of this metadata editor as an enormous boom to the entire geospatial community: People are going to be able to be informed as never and be able to make smart decisions about how, when, and why to use specific geospatial data sets, as documented with the help of the metadata editor. I salute my Esri colleagues for developing this tool and the user community in charting the way forward in the rich use of this tool.

–Joseph Kerski