Phase One of Indiana’s Framework Data Improvement Project

What is It?

Indiana’s Framework Data Improvement project is an initiative led by the Indiana Geographic Information Office, the Indiana Geographic Information Council, and participating local governments and vendors supporting local governments. This project aims to improve the quality and consistency of Indiana’s GIS data, and can be considered as the next phase of the Data Harvest program.

As mentioned in previous posts, GIS data maintained at the local level are some of the most valuable datasets for government (and non-government) business needs. The Data Harvest program aims to collect, standardize, and share some of these datasets including address points, street centerlines, parcel boundaries, and other governmental administrative boundaries.

As the GIS data collected through the Data Harvest has become more widely used by State government, Federal government, and various other organizations, providing more consistent and accurate statewide data has become more important. Some of these needs include taxation, elections, Next-Generation 911, and geocoding in general.

When requesting data during the Data Harvest process, the IGIO requests that local governments meet a specific data model/schema as they are able and willing. The IGIO adopted many components of the Next-Generation 911 GIS data model in 2020, and by 2024 has fully adopted version 2 of the standard outside of some minor changes regarding subaddress or unit information for addresses.

After conducting a pilot project in early 2023 with 5 counties, the State of Indiana released a request for proposals (RFP) for a spatial data validation platform in late 2023. This RFP was won by Datamark Technologies who has deployed an instance of their online platform VEP for the State. VEP allows local data stewards to submit their GIS data to the State and run series of validation rules against their uploaded data, ideally to eventually correct anomalies in their data to support long term data quality efforts. More information about VEP can be found further in this post.

Participating Counties

28 counties participated in phase 1 of this project. Of the 28 counties, 13 were represented primarily by full-time GIS staff, and 15 were represented primarily by vendors or contractors.

Participating counties were:

A map showing the participating counties can be found below (participating counties have a yellow hatch fill and are labelled):

While there are still a small number of counties finishing their data submissions for 2024, the majority of data has been collected and can be started to be analyzed and aggregated. In general, while the 28 counties represent a little less than 1/3 of Indiana’s 92 counties, they represent a little more than half of the total number of GIS records maintained at the local government level. Some information about the data collected in 2024 can be found below:

• Just over 1.75 million addresses (compared to a total of about 3.3 million address points collected statewide in 2023)
• About 275,000 street centerlines (compared to a total of about 550,000 street centerlines collected statewide in 2023)
• About 1.9 million parcel boundaries (compared to a total of about 3.7 million parcels collected statewide in 2023)

The Platform

The software utilized by the State through their contract with Datamark is called VEP (standing for Validate-Edit-Provision).VEP allows local government/PSAP staff and vendors to field map and upload their data into the NG911 schema, run various sets of validations on the data post-upload, view the data and markups in an interactive map, and download reports and the markup data to use in their local software. VEP also automatically aggregates the uploaded data to the statewide level. In the long term, VEP will replace the Data Harvest submission process utilized by the IGIO.

What was Checked

• Address Points - Validations for address points include a wealth of NG911 specific checks, as well as some more general checks for various attributes, and checks for features that can’t be distinguished from one another (either geometric or attribute based duplicates).
• Street Centerlines -Validations for road centerlines also include many NG911 specific checks and general attribute checks. In addition, many street centerline validations check components of address range attributes, compare address ranges from one centerline to neighboring centerlines representing the same street, and various topology checks to ensure that the centerlines are correctly snapped to one another.
• Parcel Boundaries - There are 4 primary validations that focus on parcel boundary datasets. These include checks for gaps and overlaps between parcel boundary shapes, checks between parcel boundaries and CAMA data by the state parcel identifier field, and checks for valid tax district codes represented by the first 2 and final 3 digits of the state parcel identifier field.
• Other Boundaries - Boundary validations include many NG911 specific checks, and topology checks that look for gaps and overlaps for service areas that should indicate seamless coverage.
• Cross-Layer - Cross-Layer validations mainly focus on fishbone analysis, where a line is generated from an address point to where that address falls along a street centerline based on address range information. These validations include checks to ensure that a fishbone line can be generated by matching address point to street centerline attributes, and checks that look at whether address points may be misordered or map to multiple street centerline features.

Some example fishbone datasets are shown below. The top image shows fishbones generated along a street centerline that uses a theoretical address range (such as 100-198 and 101-199 S 12^th St that uses a “100 block” address system for streets) and the bottom image shows fishbones generated along a street centerline that uses an actual address range (such as 100-114 and 101-115 Driftstone Dr, where the address range only includes a range of addresses that are actually assigned along that centerline).

Cross-Jurisdiction

Cross jurisdictional validations are critical for long term NG911 needs but have not yet been a high priority. In short, many of these validations look for gaps or overlaps in many boundary layers such as PSAP boundaries, provisioning boundaries, emergency service (EMS, fire, and law enforcement), and for addresses submitted by one county that are within another county or provisioning boundary, etc.

Feedback and Involvement

We encourage users to provide feedback or ask questions by e-mailing us at DataHarvest@iot.in.gov.