As a nerd who write chess software for computers, I find this comment hilarious.

Here in the Twin Cities, our Metropolitan Council earlier this year made the entire parcel databases of the seven metro counties available for download if you pay for it or qualify for a special license (we are a nonprofit and had previous data arrangements with them, and so were able to get access without cost).

There was a great deal of work that went into making this dataset. First the Met Council had to coax some of the counties *cough*Anoka*cough* into sharing their data for the project, as some have historically been fiercely territorial and protective of their data. The number of bureaucratic hoops you have to jump through to get a small chunk of parcels and attributes out of Hennepin County is astounding. Then the Met Council had to get all the parties to agree on a set of 55 attributes that would be common to all the parcels in the merged set.

It's a great dataset to have, I only wish there had been more resources available to improve certain things about it--some of the counties use really bizarre coordinate systems and no effort was really made to get everything to line up from county to county, so there are overlaps in some places (between Anoka and Ramsey Counties, for instance). Also, all the counties update their assessor's data on different schedules and have varying degrees of completeness, so data quality is an issue.

But frankly since this was to my knowledge an entirely public sector endeavor, it's pretty amazing it even happened at all.