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The Land Cover Information Need was not among the MetroGIS community's
priority business information needs, as defined in 1997. However, work on the
Land Cover Information Need was undertaken collaboratively by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) and
MetroGIS, beginning in 1999. Click here for further information about MetroGIS's
Business Information Needs initiative.
DNR's Metro Division initiated the Minnesota Land Cover Classification System (MLCCS) project in 1998.
Federal, state, metropolitan and local government representatives from the metro area participated on DNR's Land Cover
Steering Committee throughout the project, with the seven-county Metropolitan Area as the focus.
The Metropolitan Council's representative to the Committee, Rick Gelbmann, manager of the Council's GIS
department, encouraged collaboration between MetroGIS and DNR processes. MetroGIS established its priority information
needs with the understanding that if an organization with the interest and resources came forward with a desire to
address a lower priority common information need, MetroGIS would do what it could to support the initiative. Further,
MetroGIS also concluded that: 1) creation of a standardized land cover classification system would complement work that
was in progress on the planned and existing land use information needs, enabling a thorough analysis of any parcel of
land and 2) a standardized land cover classification system would benefit cities as they conducted their natural
resource inventories as part of their growth management planning for consistency with metro systems.
Consequently, MetroGIS and DNR co-hosted the Minnesota Land Cover Peer Review Forum on October 19, 1999. The
participants commented on the hierarchical classification scheme and general specifications developed by the DNR Land
Cover Steering Committee. In particular, they were asked to evaluate how well DNR's MLCCS scheme satisfied the MetroGIS
comm y's land cover information need. The conclusion of the forum attendees was that DNR's solution should be endorsed
as satisfying MetroGIS's land cover information needs. A summary of the participants, topics discussed, and conclusions
is presented in the Peer Review Forum Summary (Turnaround Document).
On January 26, 2000, the MetroGIS Policy Board endorsed DNR's land cover solution, which is officially
referred to as the Minnesota Land Cover Classification System (MLCCS), as the solution to MetroGIS's Land Cover
Information Need, and accepted DNR's offer to serve as regional custodian of the dataset. See the
data specifications section of regional land cover
dataset page for more information.
A central part of MetroGIS's work is to identify common information needs of GIS users in the Minneapolis/St. Paul Metropolitan Area and facilitate the policy and data specifications needed to address each of these common information needs.
An investigation to understand these common needs was conducted by MetroGIS from September 1996 to March 1997. The result of this study was the identification of thirteen priority common information needs of the MetroGIS community. Since that time, a priority function of MetroGIS has been to facilitate the development and/or assembly of regional datasets needed to address each of these common information needs.
Each information need is addressed through a replicable process. In general, the process begins by assembling a team of content experts and through a facilitated group process (Peer Review Forum), the team begins with the business object framing model fragment to identify dataset(s) required to meet the information need. In some cases, this process takes place in a forum of content experts and in other cases it is not such a formalized process because the dataset(s) that meet the information need are intuitively recognized.
Once the dataset(s) required to meet an information need is identified, a working group of content experts is created to:
- Refine the desired specifications identified at the Peer Review Forum,
- Identify desired data standards and guidelines,
- Identify desired roles and responsibilities for the custodian organization(s) - organizations responsible for data creation, maintenance, documentation, and distribution; and,
- Identify candidate custodial organizations that have a business need and appropriate expertise to carry out the desired roles and responsibilities.
The process is complete when the Policy Board has adopted, as policy for the MetroGIS community, parameters defined through the stated tasks. The parameters are posted on a Web page for each “MetroGIS endorsed regional dataset”. Once an endorsed dataset is operational, MetroGIS monitors user satisfaction to continually enhance it.
To learn more, please see the About Information Needs page and the pages for each endorsed regional dataset.
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