Welcome Texas to the Ranks of State GIS Coordination Blogs

The great (big) state of Texas now has a GIS coordination blog.The fine folks at the Texas Natural Resources Information System (TNRIS) have started a new TNRIS blog to help keep track of what's going on in Texas' GIS community.

To better keep our users informed about all TNRIS activities, we are very pleased to announce that we will now be blogging about all our activities and sharing some of the behind-the-scenes information that may be beneficial to you.  We also highly encourage your comments on any of our posts and we will use them in a very constructive manner.

The TNRIS Blog uses Posterous, a blogging system described by its founders as "the dead simple way to put anything online using email."

It joins a growing list of gis coordination blogs among many NSGIC members.

An Intriguing Question

There's legislation proposed in Texas to require a disclaimer on maps or on-line data hosted by government agencies if that data "was not produced using information from an on-the-ground survey conducted by or under the supervision of a registered professional land surveyor."

The disclaimer would have to say:

This product is for informational purposes and may not have been prepared for or be suitable for legal, engineering, or surveying purposes. It does not represent an on-the-ground survey and represents only the approximate relative location of property boundaries.

Joe Francica had a post on All Points Blog about this yesterday (Texas Bill to Require Disclaimer on Geospatial Data) and he and Adena Schutzberg discuss it today on their Podcast.

It's an interesting discussion. Adena notes that the idea does do one thing that GIS professionals would support; it highlights the need for some disclaimer about what data users are looking at ("Data on map may be closer than they appear.")

But she also asks what I think is a key question:

Are there sites out there where you can actually get on-line data that was produced by a surveyor that can be used for legal engineering and survey purposes?

We spend most of our time looking at stuff that is specifically not; that does not fall into that category because that is where most GIS lives right now.

So it would be really interesting to see the other side of the coin, whether it is from Texas or another state.

On the face of it, this is a requirement that makes a certain amount of sense, but does it solve a particular problem? Is it truly meaningful?

And, once we start looking at this issue closely, where does it finally lead? To more "GIS V. Survey" fights? Or to tough questions like that posed by Ms. Schutzberg?