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OVERVIEW Decision making, operations and planning at all levels of government in Massachusetts, including some mission critical functions, increasingly rely on the capabilities of geographic information systems (GIS) to provide information, create maps and perform analyses. Many businesses, non-profit organizations, and academic institutions similarly rely on GIS in their daily operations. At the municipal level, GIS is being used in public safety and emergency response, property assessment, planning, public health, permitting, school administration, conservation and public works. Regional agencies are using GIS for transportation planning, economic development studies, housing studies, regional development plans and to provide technical assistance to communities on local planning and zoning issues. At the state level, agencies are using GIS for public safety, emergency management and pre-disaster mitigation, permitting review, site development, transportation corridor planning, asset management, natural resource inventory, water supply protection, open space planning and many other purposes. More and more GIS is showing up on municipal web sites - see examples. Regional planning agencies are also moving GIS information on-line - e.g. MAPCs on-line mapping and data exploration tool. State agency web sites with on-line mapping include Department of Revenue, Department of Environmental Protection, Coastal Zone Management, State Police, Information Technology Division as well as MassGIS itself. Outside of government, there is widespread use of sites such as Google Maps, MapQuest, and Yahoo! Maps as well as on-line mapping from real estate web sites such as Zillow and Coldwell Banker. Use of GIS tools is common in many other business sectors including environmental site evaluation, planning and engineering, survey, retail location, health care, insurance, marketing, and delivery services. These public and private sector applications rely on having up-to-date, accurate, and complete map information or "spatial data". Many government agencies rely on the same few essential spatial data sets, often obtained from other agencies, as the base for their use of GIS. Also, it should be recognized that much private sector GIS activity depends on public sector data - for example, Google Maps photo base map for Massachusetts includes imagery from MassGIS, and the roads (from Navteq) are being updated through a public/private partnership between the Executive Offices of Public Safety and Transportation, MassGIS and Navteq, a private company.. In an increasingly electronic world, key GIS data layers need to be recognized as a shared resource - the Massachusetts Spatial Data Infrastructure. Too often Massachusetts spatial data has been developed and maintained haphazardly through whatever funding and staffing agencies can put together, on occasion through ad hoc agreements between agencies; there is no systematic, sustainable approach to developing and maintaining a shared data infrastructure. This ad-hoc approach has resulted in agencies using data that are not current or complete, or in redundant and uncoordinated efforts to create or maintain data. Lack of accurate, accessible and standardized data hinders effective service delivery and limits public agency options for developing operational efficiencies and using GIS to support policy priorities and respond to public needs. The Strategic Plan for Massachusetts' Spatial Data Infrastructure describes the current use of spatial information use in Massachusetts and provides a framework for addressing the overall lack of coordination. The vision presented in the strategic plan provides recommendations for the development and maintenance of the four most widely used and important map "layers":
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Last Updated 9/5/2008
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