The State Land Information Board, now the State GIS Board, developed this document in order to support the legislative initiatives to establish the Arkansas Spatial Data Infrastructure (Arkansas Code 15-21-5). Spatial data layers are often stored digitally and accessed through a relational database management system (RDBMS). Although the centerline file is a component of the Arkansas Spatial Data Infrastructure, the way in which people format and maintain it can differ. People often disagree on the way a particular spatial data layer structure should be organized. This can pose problems in terms of sharing, locating, and extracting spatial data information. It is intended that these standards will benefit the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) user communities in numerous ways, including but not limited to: The National Map Program¹, The TIGER Modernization Program², E-911 applications, routing services, and location dependent services.

The following standards specifically speak to methodologies for creating a seamless statewide Arkansas Centerline File with address ranges that are shareable, geocodable, and have a horizontal accuracy better than 10 meters.