If the point represents an areal feature such as a city, the primary point is generally located in the center of the area. The determination of 'center' was subjective. In other situations, the location of a major town feature such as the town hall was used to locate the point. Additional, secondary points might also be used to represent the same area, especially if it appeared on more than one quad map. For linear features such as rivers, the primary locator point is at the mouth of the river.
Secondary points appear for that river on each quad map where it appears.
In creating the GIS coverage, LMIC extracted only the primary location features. Vertical Positional Accuracy Elevation information is reported only if it is reported on the USGS 7.5-minute topographic map. Vertical positional accuracy reflects that of the National Mapping Program. Lineage The source data for the Minnesota GNIS GIS point file is the USGS-GNIS data base, 'National Geographic Names Database', which is an ascii text file. Certain data elements were extracted from the original USGS table.