This talk presents a vision to find types of land use across the state. Because land use codes are often found in parcel databases and the state is constructing a comprehensive parcel database, in the future, statewide queries could be made over land use codes. The problem, however, is that land use codes are created locally. As a result, they vary between jurisdictions and may not match. For example, a shopping center in one jurisdictional code set could be called multi-retail, mall, or strip mall in other code sets. Some codes will map directly to each other, either exactly or as synonyms, but other codes could be sub or super classes of each other. We took seven different land use coding systems in Wisconsin and merged them into one large hierarchy. A search of this hierarchy enables someone to request a certain land use and get related land use terms. Computer code could eventually be written to then return the actual parcels that have related land uses, perhaps in a map display.
