Poster Presentation C Thursday, 5:00 – 6:00 pm C Edmund Fitzgerald Exhibit Hall

A New State Standard for Coding Cities and Townships in Minnesota

Mark Kotz
Metropolitan Council
230 East 5th Street
St. Paul, MN  55101
mark.kotz@metc.state.mn.us

Chris Cialek
Minnesota Planning Land Management Information Center
300 Centennial Building
658 Cedar Street
St. Paul, MN  55155

Why should I look at this poster?

Many GIS professionals deal with data related to cities and townships in Minnesota. Being aware of a new proposed state standard for city and township IDs will allow those professionals to more easily share data with others in their organization and with other organizations. Handouts describing the standard will be available during the poster session. Information on links to resources to help use the standard, including a downloadable table that links the ID with the city or township name, the county and other popular city and township coding schemes, will also be available. 

What is the standard?

Numeric Codes for the Identification of Cities, Townships & Unorganized Territories in Minnesota is (at the time this abstract was written) a proposed state standard based on a well-used federal standard. The city, township and unorganized territory codes that make up this standard comprise a subset of the Federal Information Processing Standard Publication 55-3 (FIPS PUB 55-3) that covers the state of Minnesota. This standard includes five-digit place codes that represent all cities, townships and unorganized territories.

This code is part of a federal standard designed to nest with FIPS county codes and state codes, both of which are also approved state standards in Minnesota.