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Land Information Ontario adds value with geospatial web services
A school board in Ontario designs its school zones to reflect the geographic distribution of its students... a city decides where to build a new hospital... a dispatcher directs the closest ambulance to an accident scene. These are just a few of the applications Ontarians can expect from a host of new web services under development by Land Information Ontario (LIO), part of the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources.
For instance, one service will take a civic address and turn it into a set of geographic coordinates. Consequently, organizations will be able to turn tabular civic address information into dots on an on-line map. This capability will enable the organizations to relate addresses to locations of businesses, people, buildings, and roads.
"Right now it's difficult to overlay third-party statistical information on our data, and query and analyze it," says Brian Maloney, Surveyor General of Ontario. "By integrating civic address information with our databases, however, we'll gain that ability. It becomes an extremely powerful tool."
In addition, LIO is deploying a geolocator service that will permit web users to zoom to a geographic location based on a place name. And a related map navigator service will generate reports or searches based on a geographic feature such as a road or railway crossing.
"GeoConnections has endorsed a web-based vision for the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure for some time," says Mr. Maloney. "And we're taking advantage of that vision now. Our web services will make geospatial data widely available to people who haven't traditionally used this type of information. I credit GeoConnections for their foresight in supporting the development and application of web technology and encouraging the rest of us to get onboard. It's going to open up doors to the use of geospatial information to tackle and solve important issues in Ontario."
Paving the way for the Ontario Road Network
By being part of the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure (CGDI), LIO ensures that the public and private sectors can easily find, access, and work with Ontario land information. Users can also rely on the CGDI to locate information about Ontario that is housed within other organizations. People use all of this information in many ways: to conduct environmental reviews, examine demographic trends, plan land development, and assess population health, to name but a few.
Traditionally, organizations rely on different standards and approaches to collect and manage land information in Ontario. As a result, data can be hard to find, difficult to share, and costly to keep up. By standardizing the way that data is collected, managed, and accessed, however, LIO avoids many of these shortcomings.
One of LIO's programs involves replacing Ontario's fractured, multi-standard road data with a province-wide roads and civic address database. With funding from GeoConnections, LIO has developed a standard way to record, display, and share information about Ontario road surfaces, speeds, and lane numbers. Designed for municipal, provincial, and federal agencies, this information will be integrated with other provincial road data to produce the Ontario portion of the GeoBase national road network –one of the components of the CGDI.
Terry Chapman is a GIS Specialist with the Upper Thames River Conservation Authority (UTRCA). Tasked with identifying flood plains and maintaining a flood forecasting and warning system, the UTRCA monitors waterways within a 4000 square kilometre watershed in southern Ontario. The organization uses the Ontario Road Network to locate sites during day-to-day business and to identify roads that could be in danger when flood waters rise.
"We can produce maps that integrate waterways and roads into one view," says Mr. Chapman. "We can see where roads cross waterways, and better understand which low-lying roads are vulnerable to flooding. That knowledge enables us to notify watershed municipalities of potential problems during floods and offer advice to road builders as well."
The benefits of partnership
Working with GeoConnections has kept LIO marching forward. "We would definitely be further behind without GeoConnections," says Mr. Maloney. "They've been important in helping us foster relationships, not only with the federal government, but also with other provinces and territories."
Those relationships are paying dividends, too. For instance, LIO worked recently with other provinces, the territories, and GeoConnections to establish a national service to improve the accuracy of global positioning system (GPS) readings. "If GeoConnections hadn't been involved, I don't think we would have got all the parties onboard," says Mr. Maloney. "I'm optimistic that this is going to be a good service for Canadians."
As Land Information Ontario, GeoConnections, the provinces, and the territories are proving, by working together, they can achieve greater results than any one of them can on its own.
GeoConnections is a national partnership initiative, led by Natural Resources Canada, to build the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure (CGDI) and to make Canada's geospatial databases, tools, and services readily accessible on-line. |