Data management associated with real property tax functions works in a relatively standard way all over the state. However, parcel data management outside of tax functions vary widely and the typical arrangement is best described as ad hoc. Users of parcel data must make many individual data requests to different data sources. As noted above, a few local governments have data management strategies in place that address the needs of external users, but in most places requests are handled on a one-by-one basis. At the same time almost no feedback mechanisms exist between data users and data collectors, so that the investments that users make in data improvements are not built back into improvements in the original data sources.

Figure 3. Lack of feedback mechanisms to improve data

Figure 3 shows the lack of update and feedback mechanisms in the typical data flow. Note that nearly all the arrows point in only one direction – from the data source to a requester. Many users obtain data from municipal, county, and state sources, but (with the notable exception of the statewide GIS Data Sharing Cooperative) users are neither expected nor allowed to return data corrections, enhancements, or other improvements to the data sources. When users obtain annual or other updates from their data sources, they can actually make the situation worse because the data they have improved can be replaced by some of the same old errors that still exist in the source files. The difficult choice is to forgo the updates in order to keep their own corrections, lose some of their corrections in order to obtain updated files for other records, or engage in very costly and time consuming matching and integration activities.