Description: This layer is the official state-maintained street transportation dataset available from MassGIS and represents all the public and a good portion of the private roadways in Massachusetts, including designations for Interstate, U.S. and State highways. Formerly known as the Massachusetts Highway Department (MHD) Roads, then the Executive Office of Transportation - Office of Transportation Planning (EOT-OTP) Roads, The MassDOT roads layer includes linework from the 1:5,000 road and rail centerlines data that were interpreted as part of the Black and White Digital Orthophoto project. The Massachusetts Department of Transportation - Office of Transportation Planning, which maintains this layer, continues to add linework from municipal and other sources and update existing linework using the most recent color orthophoto imagery as a base. In addition to the new linework, the attribute table includes all "road inventory" items maintained in MassDOT's linear referencing system.The layer is up-to-date through December 31, 2013.In ArcSDE this layer is named EOTROADS_ARC.
Copyright Text: Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT), MassGIS
Description: The political boundary datalayer is a polygon representation of town boundaries created from arcs developed from survey coordinates extracted from the 68-volume Harbor and Lands Commission Town Boundary Atlas for the 351 communities (cities and towns) in Massachusetts. The Atlas was published in the early 1900's and is maintained by the Survey Section of Massachusetts Highway Department. For communities with a coastal boundary, MassGIS has collaborated with Massachusetts Water Resources Authority and the Department of Environmental Protection to complete a 1:12000 scale coastline. The boundary for the coastline was defined as being the upland side of tidal flats and rocky inter-tidal zones. Note that the 351 communities are the official municipal names, not including "villages" or other sections of towns.