Making plans findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable with data infrastructure: A search engine for constructing, analyzing, and visualizing planning documents

Abstract

Local land-use plans help guide future development, but it is often difficult to compare content across jurisdictions, making regional coordination and plan evaluation challenging. This research reviews federal, state, and local data infrastructure guidance for land-use plans and compares such guidance to compliance with a California use-case. Findings indicate a number of obstacles to fostering data sharing and comparative analysis of plans: there is currently no central repository of land-use plans; plans are not uniform in format and are often out of date; many plans are not machine-readable thereby inhibiting text extraction, and planning language varies so greatly that there are numerous synonyms for terms of interest. Nonetheless, we demonstrate that the creation of digital platforms for archiving and searching across plans is currently feasible and enables large-scale quantitative analysis. Based on currently available metadata in existing land-use plans, we designed and piloted a structured database to enable users to search for terms and phrases across over 500 land-use plans. To center issues of social equity, the open access platform was developed in collaboration with state agencies and community organizations focused on environmental justice. Based on the pilot, we conclude with a framework for both developing plan data infrastructure given current constraints in standardized plan metadata and availability as well as guidance for plan formatting using FAIR standards (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable).