Am I missing an ‘h’? Geographic codes and naming standards in Vermont
This week VCGI is announcing passage of our new Geographic Codes standard, developed by us in collaboration with other members of state government and the wider Vermont geospatial community. This standard is meant to help our state data “play nice” with others (even if it isn’t strictly geospatial), by recommending a set of codes be used to describe commonly-used incorporated geographies. In Vermont, these geographies include our state, counties, towns, cities, and villages, along with our less-inhabited gores and grant (yes, only one grant — it’s a New England thing), and regional planning commissions. We chose to adopt the ANSI GEOID format for our codes, as they are used by the Census and other federal entities and make data interoperability almost painless.
Why codes?
Geographies change. Habitation patterns ebb and flow, meandering rivers diverge from town borders, and surveys redefine the borders of land parcels. In these ways, the boundaries used to define political subdivisions of the U.S. alter over time. The embedding of geographic codes within boundary data ensures that these shifting borders continue to represent the geographic entities to which they refer.
Place names are malleable. It might be easy to generate a spreadsheet of town names for Vermont, but the act of creating such a list involves making a series of choices. For one, is it “St. George” or “Saint George”? Does Alburg have an “h”? “Buel’s Gore” or “Buels Gore”?
The variety of spelling and punctuation options can lead to inconsistency across data sources, which makes working with the data a lot harder down the road. Inconsistency also makes thematic mapping (displaying themed data based on geographic areas) much more difficult. For example, idiosyncrasies within town names could lead to failure when attempting to link the data to town boundaries for symbolization.
Place names also change over time. In Vermont, we have witnessed changes in the spelling of certain town names from -burg to -burgh (a melting of the ice-burgs, maybe) over the past few decades, most notably for the towns of Alburgh, Ferrisburgh, and Enosburgh. These changes represent an effort to reclaim the original spelling of town charters after an ambitious and unsuccessful attempt by the Board of Geographic Names in 1892 to standardize the names of U.S. towns ending in -b(o)urg/h to -burg. Using numerical codes to refer to geographies ensures that towns are linked with the most up-to-date town names.
Codes are standardized, unique, and informational. By using the Census codes, we ensure that the codes that describe Vermont geographic areas are unique within the state and the country, and conform to a federal standard. Plus, by using a “concatenated” code format — a code format that starts with our state code, 50, and builds by adding relevant geographies to the right (i.e. Addison County, 50001) — information about multiple geographic levels can be preserved within a single code. The problem of preserving leading zeroes (an issue in our previous code standard) is rendered irrelevant with this format.
Example town code: 5000785150
[50]: VT
[007]: Chittenden County
[85150]: Winooski City
The codes are linked to official names from the Board of Geographic Names, so you don’t have to trust yourself to remember whether Buels Gore or Warren’s Gore is the one with the apostrophe.
How will my maps benefit?
In the coming months, we’ll be embedding these codes within many of Vermont’s essential geographical datasets, including our boundary (state, county, town, village, and RPC) and parcel data. With these codes, state data can be seamlessly joined to other state data as well as national datasets. We are publishing crosswalks so that data partners from across state government and beyond can join data with the older codes to the newer series. We are in the process of creating spreadsheet templates that allow you to use the codes for non-geospatial data that can then be joined to our boundary data for visualization.
It still bothers me that Buels Gore doesn’t have an apostrophe, but Warren’s Gore does.
I hear you, although I would argue that you care a bit too much about punctuation to be on the internet. There is, however, an existing process for getting place names changed.
Still curious? Explore town codes in Vermont yourself in the web map linked below.
As for the codes themselves, they’re available for download in .xls, .csv, and .dbf formats at our Open Geodata Portal.
