The Cost of Data

This popped up on my Google News alert and then on several blogs. Santa Clara County California is being taken to court over their high fees for the purchase of GIS data. Here's what their data costs according to their Basemap Request Form:

(One-time purchase, entire county)

• Parcels: $126,000
• Streets: $4,312
• Address: $140,000 (assuming these are address points)
• ROW: $32,200
• APN: $126,000 (assuming this is Assessor Parcel Number, but don't know if these are separate points, or just added as an attribute to the parcels).

Total: $428,512 +$250 processing fee

To bring everything in perspective, the population of Santa Clara County is 1,699,052. So they are asking about $0.252 per person for all of their GIS data. Using this metric, here's what the top four Wisconsin Counties would be charging for their GIS data based on population:

• Milwaukee: $236,921
• Dane: $107,485
• Waukesha: $90,913
• Brown: $57,118

Going a big step further, with the US population fast approaching 300 Million, the total value of the US parcel dataset is worth about $75.7 Billion.

BTW - I tried finding the actual case documents, but the website kept timing out. Hopefully someone will post a link to the soon. The devil is always in the details.