FOCUS ON:
Renewed GeoConnections
The 2010 Federal Budget announced renewed funding for the GeoConnections program. The Budget provides $11 million in funding over the next two years to continue development of the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure (CGDI) and to provide consolidated geographic-related information to Canadians via the Internet.
Resources & Tools
Web mapping service to spark online mapping revolution
Suppose you’re a municipal planner in charge of expanding the public transit system. Wouldn’t your job be simpler if you could create a map showing potential transit routes, local conservation areas, and proposed housing developments—all in one?
A breakthrough in web mapping technology promises to bring this visual dexterity to municipal planners and thousands of other Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure (CGDI) users throughout Canada. Web mapping services let people present geographic information as maps on the Internet. In short, it’s a way of turning data into maps using nothing more than a standard web browser—users no longer need special geographic information systems (GIS) software to create custom maps.
The Centre for Topographic Information of Natural Resources Canada in Sherbrooke, Quebec, as well as provincial mapping authorities in B.C. and Ontario all now offer web mapping services. The GeoConnections Discovery Portal at geodiscover.cgdi.ca provides links to these services, which allow users to easily integrate maps of roads, rivers, contour lines, railways, and other topographic data.
Use the Atlas of Canada to create custom thematic maps
Users can also reach the Atlas of Canada (www.atlas.gc.ca) through the GeoConnections Discovery Portal. There they’ll find maps rich with thematic content—agriculture, forests, fresh water, wetlands, recreational areas, health, and so on. With web mapping services, users can blend maps from the Atlas of Canada with their own data to produce custom maps. For example, a tour guide company could merge its tourist-region data with the base map from the Atlas of Canada. The result: a unique map from the tour guide company that portrays tourist regions in Canada even though they don’t actually have a map of Canada to offer!.
This integration offers numerous benefits. For one, it saves time and labour. Without web mapping service, users have to request specific data sets from a data vendor. The data vendor then packages the data and sends it by mail or courier. When the data arrives, users unpackage it and integrate it with their applications, often a slow process. With web mapping service, however, users can integrate maps in real time. And users work with the most current data as well, another bonus.
Moreover, a web mapping service reduces barriers to sharing geospatial information—an important part of building the CGDI. As a result, organizations can easily combine data from different sources to make better and faster decisions.
Standards oil the CGDI
Imagine if each of your kitchen appliances had a unique electrical plug, and no two appliances could use the same electrical socket—an incredible limitation. Electrical pioneers realized the necessity of standardizing electrical sockets, and so too has the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) recognized the necessity of standardizing web mapping technology. In fact, it’s thanks to these OGC standards that users can now immediately overlay and work with views of digital map data from a host of online and internal sources. Standards allow users to integrate various data sources over the Internet on demand.
Relying on similar technological advances, users can also now blend gazetteer data—information about places—with mapping services to produce unique views of areas or topics of interest. For instance, one application might combine data from a flood-risk mapping service with data from a gazetteer service. Then, by inputting their postal codes, homeowners could find out the likelihood of flooding on their streets.
Fulfilling a vision
When GeoConnections set out to build the CGDI, the organization established seven guiding principles. Among them, that the CGDI should be open and transparent. Web mapping service is an excellent example of the successful application of these principles and their underlying vision.