Disclaimer and Policy

The following applies to all services, downloads, links, and other content included or referenced in all geospatial data, mapping products, and services created or hosted by the Utah Automated Geographic Reference Center (AGRC), including the contents of the SGID:

This product is for informational purposes and may not have been prepared for, or be suitable for legal, engineering, or surveying purposes. Users of this information should review or consult the primary data and information sources to ascertain the usability of the information. AGRC provides these data in good faith and shall in no event be liable for any incorrect results, any lost profits and special, indirect or consequential damages to any party, arising out of or in connection with the use or the inability to use the data hereon or the services provided. AGRC shall not be held liable for any third party’s interpretation of data provided by AGRC. AGRC provides these data and services as a public service. AGRC reserves the right to change or revise published data and/or these services at any time.

Attribution

AGRC requests that where possible and practical appropriate attribution shall be made by users of this website or any other services provided by AGRC with the following criteria:

  • an appropriate statement, reflecting this disclaimer be used on all products using SGID geospatial data as a source, and that a currency date and stewardship credit for the data be included on the map; and
  • standards-compliant and/or search engine-optimized (SEO) metadata, where available, be included with any distribution of all geospatial data
About Geographic Data

Geographic data attempts to model real world phenomena and their locational signature in a digital format.

Different data storage strategies are used for geographic data depending on how it was collected and what it represents. There are two major data format categories for GIS data are:

  • Vector: geographic features are represented by discrete points, lines, and polygons; and, raster data sets, which represent geographic phenomena using a grid of raster cells or pixels. Generally speaking, vector data is usually used to describe features such as roads, municipal boundaries (such as cities or counties), springs, streams, airports, etc.Common formats include shapefile, geodatabase, kml, gml, geoJSON, computer aided design (CAD),
  • Raster: usually, raster data is collected from satellite or other remotely-sensed or pixel-based data, and includes aerial photos, digital elevation models, scanned images of paper maps, pre-rendered map image tiles, etc. For thematic data, raster is particularly useful for data that lacks a well-defined borders like soil and vegetation types, climate zones, elevation, etc.Common file formats include JPG, GeoTIFF, PNG, ESRI Grid, DEM, and IMG.
To facilitate appropriate utilization, best practices dictate that metadata accompany geographic data files and services. Metadata can take the form of FGDC, ISO, ArcMap formats as well as other techniques.