GIS & Geospatial Data Services

Whenever your project study area is confined to a single city, county, or metropolitan region, there are certain potential sources of geospatial data that you should check which might provide you with useful information.  The websites of city governments, county governments, associations of governments, school districts, vector control districts, transit agencies, and other local government agency websites are all potential sources of data that you can work with using GIS software.  The larger the population of a particular metropolitan area, the more likely it is that local cities and counties will have GIS compatible data freely available for download from their respective websites, but there is a great level of variation between cities and counties in terms of both which datasets they make available and the total number of datasets they have and are willing to share.  While one county in a metro area may have a well developed geoportal with dozens of datasets available for download, a neighboring county may not publicly share any geospatial data at all or may provide only a few select datasets.  While one city may have its building outline polygon data freely posted on its website but no information about pothole locations identified on city streets, another nearby city may not offer building polygon data but have pothole location data available for the public to download.

It is also important to recognize that useful geospatial data for a particular metropolitan region can also often be obtained from state or federal sources.  For example, a local city may not have any geospatial demographic information available on its website, but detailed demographic data for any metro area in the United States can easily be obtained from the U.S. Census Bureau.  Thus, it is important to consider the type of data that you are interested in and to look at the websites of government agencies at both the state and federal level to see if they have data available that is relevant to your project study area.