But thanks to the Pennsylvania Spatial Data Access, government planners, engineers and even school students can quickly locate free geographic data and images about Pennsylvania communities through the Internet. Pennsylvania Spatial Data Access is the official State Geospatial Data clearinghouse for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. County planners evaluating future land growth can download thousands of dollars' worth of geographic data for free.
Students can analyze digital aerial photographs from their classrooms via the Internet.
Engineering firms can find the appropriate data that helps determine environmental impact of construction projects. Currently, visitors to the web site can download more than 10,550 data sets and 8,228 metadata records, which are descriptions of data and where to obtain the complete data. This holistic approach involves not only Commonwealth agencies but also all producers of all Pennsylvania GIS data, resulting in a great resource for state, county and local governments. For example, Kelly notes, to obtain information about a county's roads, one agency has maps showing the state and major county roads, but another agency might include the smaller township roads in their maps as well. For Brandywine Conservancy, its efforts to work with municipal officials, developers and landowners to protect the watershed in Chester and Delaware Counties near Philadelphia require the use of maps to illustrate issues such as zoning changes or cluster housing development.