W2: Oral Presentation C Friday, 11:00 – 11:30 am C Lake Superior Ballroom L

Geo-Coding the Minnesota Office of Tourism's Business Partners

Norman Anderson
Minnesota Planning Land Management Information Center
330 Centennial Building
658 Cedar Street
St. Paul, MN  55108
norman.anderson@state.mn.us

This presentation will discuss the challenge of updating the Minnesota Office of Tourism’s geo-codes of its business partners, i.e., accommodations (resorts, motels or campgrounds) and attractions (museums, parks or golf courses). Since many of these places occur in rural areas, the partners were asked to be involved in verifying locations. Geo-codes existed for approximately half of the partners. New partners were mapped by a process to capture the ‘best’ location with the most confidence. At the highest level of confidence was a location determined by the Lawrence Group (TLG) data with an address match; conversely the lowest was positioned by the centroid of the address city. Several thousand existing and new locations were then printed and sent to the business partner for review. Maps with a low confidence location were printed at a smaller scale to give the reviewer enough extent and information to provide the correct location. Workstation ArcInfo and AML were used to generate all the maps.