In February 2023, the Minnesota Geospatial Commons surpassed the 1,000 resource count, published by 45 partner organizations. Recently published resources include Dakota County's Fall 2022 aerial photography, and the Prioritize Target Measure Application (PTMApp) from the Board of Water and Soil Resources (BWSR).

We will be performing planned system maintenance on the Geospatial Commons on Thursday, November 17, from 2:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m. During this time, all Geospatial Commons webpages and FTP sites will be unavailable and nightly publishing processes are likely to be delayed until Thursday evening.

This maintenance is being done to help ensure our operating systems are patched and secure. In order to reduce overall downtime, we perform maintenance during non-peak hours every 6 months.

Users of the Minnesota Geospatial Commons now have access to more than 900 resources, published by 45 partner organizations.

The Commons launched in 2015, with nearly 200 resources from 9 publishers. Since then, a growing number of publishers have steadily added geospatial data, maps and services.

A sampling of recently added items illustrates the range of topics available:

Measurements Added

On February 11, 2021, the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) published a version of its road datasets that includes measurement attributes. These attributes support running linear events as well as the ability to extract measurements. This change completes the agency’s transition from its previous Transportation Information System (TIS) to a Linear Referencing System (LRS).

On December 16, MNIT staff partnering with the Department of Education (MDE) will publish schema changes and content updates to the following three data resources on the Minnesota Geospatial Commons:

On May 28, 2020, MNIT will upgrade the Minnesota Geospatial Commons. We anticipate no service interruption during this process. If you experience any technical issues after the upgrade, please contact the Minnesota Geospatial Information Office.

MNIT staff partnering with the Department of Education (MDE) have published three ArcGIS Server Web Mapping Services to the Esri ArcGIS Online (AGOL) platform. These will replace several that are planned for retirement on January 15, 2020.

MDE encourages AGOL users, web map developers, and GIS practitioners that previously used these services to reconfigure their applications against the newly deployed services as soon as possible.

The Commons now has a version of the region's parcel data that matches the new Parcel Data Transfer Standard. 

Much like recently released Address Point Data, the compiled regional data is made possible by widespread collaboration among many partners. Metro area cities and counties worked swiftly to align their datasets with the new standard, and the Metropolitan Council aggregated and validated the multi-county dataset.

As attendees of the Minnesota GIS/LIS Consortium Fall Conference know, the Geospatial Commons was recently awarded a Governor's Geospatial Commendation. The Minnesota Geospatial Advisory Council (GAC) recommends the Governor’s Office’s award, and it is only presented in years when nominated efforts meet the very high standards set by the Council. This year, the Governor’s Geospatial Commendation also recognized the John R. Borchert Map Library for its historical aerial photographs collection.

A long-awaited regional milestone has arrived! A complete seven-county metro address point dataset is now available from the Minnesota Geospatial Commons. Its attributes follow the recently adopted state address point data standard.

The dataset aims to contain a point location and the official address for all occupiable units and other official addresses within each address authority's jurisdiction. Address authorities are usually cities.