A two-day cadastral conference was hosted by the Black Hills Digital Mapping Association in Rapid City, South Dakota, on September 18 and 19, 2007. The conference brochure with the program agenda is available here: BHDMA 2007 Conference Brochure.pdf . The conference was a success and achieved the goal of educating the South Dakota GIS Community about the need for a statewide cadastral data layer.

The conference agenda was organized around the idea of showing attendees the business case for a South Dakota digital cadastre. Speakers and presentations that helped to achieve this goal included:

• Stu Kirkpatrick, Montana State GIS Coordinator, spoke on how Montana approached the creation of a statewide, multipurpose cadastre and who uses the data now.
• Bob Ader of the Bureau of Land Management talked about making the business case for a cadastral layer and discussed how the Geographic Coordinate Data Base (GCDB) can be a tool for assisting in the process.
• Dennis Kron of Stearns County, Minnesota, spoke about how a county goes about managing digital land information and what value such data has for a county.
• Jeanne Foust of ESRI spoke on cadastral standards and interoperability considerations.
• Berne Jackson, a Senior GIS Analyst for the Coeur d'Alene Tribe in Idaho talked about how the tribe has developed and continues to maintain parcel data for all property within tribal boundaries and how it coordinates with two counties.
• Chris Liske of ESRI spoke on the technical issue of designing, editing, and maintaining a cadastral data layer.
• Hank Garie of GeoAnalytics talked about how geographic resources are a strategic asset and furthered the discussion of the business needs for cadastral data.
• David Gowen, geography professor at USC and author of numerous publications on cadastral data development, discussed in detail the vision for national land parcel data and why it is important.
• Otto Doll, South Dakota CIO, spoke on the state's perspective of the cadastral initiative and opened the floor to questions that provided a lively discussion on the importance of a statewide cadastre and how to get there.

Two concurrent sessions were held on the second day, with one general interest track and one cadastral track. In the cadastral track, speakers presented on local government cadastres in South Dakota, how cadastral data is used with emergency management, and how cadastral data is used for wildland fire management.

In addition to speakers, there was a panel discussion of speakers on cadastral experiences from national, state, tribal, and local perspectives, and a facilitated discussion on South Dakota cadastral experiences and perspectives.