MassGIS

We’ll shift gears and write about something other than electronic recording. Earlier today I traveled to Waltham to participate in a meeting of the Massachusetts Geographic Information Council (MGIC). The topic of the meeting was “Prospects for Integrating Massachusetts Land Records Information.” The meeting notice is available at http://www.mass.gov/mgis/mgic_ix.htm which is a link on the website of MassGIS, the Commonwealth’s Office of Geographic and Environmental Information (http://www.mass.gov/mgis/). The PowerPoint presentations that were given are supposed to appear on the MassGIS site in a day or two. The concept is to link information at the registry of deeds which is the most up to date record of the property’s ownership with information at the assessor’s office which contains much more detailed information about the property such as how it is used, what’s built on it and how much it’s assessed for. Best of all, the link between the two databases will be the area maps provided by MassGIS. The first stage will be to add a “GIS” button to records that appear on the registry website so when you view a deed, mortgage or other document about a particular property, you simply click on the GIS button and a map with the parcel highlighted in its center appears along with a variety of tools that lets you display assessor’s information about the lot, the overhead photographs of the area and an almost infinite amount of other data. The next step will be to reverse the route so when you start at the map, you can, with a single click of your mouse, display all registry of deeds records pertaining to that parcel. Best of all is that the technological requirements to make all of this happen are quite simple. The challenge will be to find ways to standardize the data that populates the common fields – names, addresses and book and page numbers – that currently populate the two databases.