Abstract
Building a State Wide Municipal Boundary Parcel Fabric
Track: High Accuracy GIS
Authors: Edward OBrien
Municipal Boundary lines often were intended to be straight lines between two corner monuments, but were in fact often surveyed and monumented with line stones that were placed slightly off the intended line. These monuments then were accepted and acquiesced to by adjoining communities. The current GIS Municipal Boundary SHP file available in Rhode Island is the result of heads up digitizing from USGS maps and does not agree with modern survey locations of known monuments by a substantial amount in some areas.
A Statewide Parcel Fabric will be developed and anchored with the best available survey locations of monuments. Record plat locations and field notes will be used to compile a working research file to inventory existing monuments and the research documents hyperlinked to the appropriate features. The State Wide Municipal Boundary Parcel Fabric will develop a means to identify areas of concern that will require field surveys, recording of plats and perhaps legislative fixes when necessary. The State Wide Municipal Boundary Parcel Fabric will serve as a repository of field surveys completed and of individual monument locations measured. The result will be a "first stop" research tool for land surveyors doing surveys adjacent to Municipal Boundaries and an improved data layer for GIS practitioners.
This project hopes to demonstrate the municipal boundaries can be incrementally improved as better data is gathered, and can serve as a frame work for the limits of statewide municipal parcel mapping. This presentation will explore the progress of this work in progress.