GIS is used by many organizations around the world to capture, manage, analyze, and visualize data to aid information management and decision making.  Local institutions in Champaign County recognized the need to share, standardize, and align their spatial data, and formed the Champaign County GIS Consortium (CCGISC) for this purpose in 2002. Seven organizations serve as member agencies, including local municipalities and the University of Illinois, while several other institutions participate as data clients, using GIS data for applications.  The Consortium also sells data and maps to organizations and individuals. 

The Champaign County GIS Consortium was created in 2002 through an intergovernmental agreement between seven agencies, including: Champaign County, the cities of Champaign and Urbana, the villages of Rantoul, Mahomet, and Savoy, and the University of Illinois. Champaign County was designated as the lead member of the Consortium.  Through a Memorandum of Understanding, the County passed administrative responsibility to the Champaign County Regional Planning Commission (CCRPC).  The servers are managed by County IT staff and are incorporated into the county’s wide area network (WAN), proving fast connections between county buildings and the City of Urbana.  Since 2002, the Consortium has steadily increased the amount of data that it maintains and makes available to the public and member agencies. In 2010, data was made accessible to the public through an interactive online map service.

This CU wiki entry began as a UIUC research project.  For more on that see Study of UC2B Anchor Institutions' Technology Use