My brother told me today that Minnesota was one of the first in the game of GIS mapping. Hence, the state offers a wealth of geospatial data at Minnesota GIS and Maps.

Here’s a sample of their data on daycare providers.

This dataset is a collection of records that communicate the locations of child care, family child care and certified child care centers in Minnesota. It was created by downloading licensing information from the Minnesota Department of Human Services (DHS), geocoding the spreadsheet records and converting them to a spatial format. The approximately 10,000 records are combined into one layer, which can be queried to separate by license type. This version focuses on a smaller set of core attributes than can be found on DHS’s Licensing Information Lookup Page; see that page for all the attributes: https://licensinglookup.dhs.state.mn.us/

There’s a section called What’s in My Neighborhood?

The MPCA’s What’s in My Neighborhood contains a wide variety of environmental information about your community. This includes potentially contaminated sites, permits, licenses, registrations, inspections, and closed enforcement activities.

Potentially contaminated sites: Since the early 1980s when major federal and state cleanup programs were created, the MPCA has been aggressively searching for and helping to clean up contaminated properties, from very small to large. This website contains a searchable inventory of those properties, as well as sites that have already been cleaned up and those currently being investigated or cleaned up.

Environmental permits and registrations: This Web application also contains a searchable inventory of businesses that have applied for and received different types of environmental permits and registrations from the MPCA.