Related Links
CGDI online training
This online course is designed to introduce you to the various components of the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure, their functionality, and the standards and specifications necessary to implement them.more
Resources & Tools
Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure Interoperability Pilot project
Access to current, standardized and national geospatial data is critical for doing many tasks and making many decisions. For example, emergency measures personnel responding to an industrial accident involving a toxic plume need access to the up-to-date data to develop evacuation plans for the affected areas.
The Canadian government is partnering with the provinces, the territories, academia, NGO’s and the private sector to develop the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure(CGDI) to improve access to geospatial data and services. The CGDI is the technology, standards, access systems and protocols required to harmonize all of Canada’s geospatial databases and make them accessible on the Internet.
Objectives
The main objective of the CGDI Interoperability Pilot (IP) project was to test the feasibility of using open standards-based technology to improve the management and dissemination of CGDI data. In particular, this project demonstrated that technology from multiple vendors based on the Open Geospatial Consortium’s Web Feature Service (WFS) standard could interoperate to provide access to the most current and authoritative data; thereby maintaining currency, avoiding versioning and minimizing duplication of the data.
A secondary objective was to develop a collaborative technical network with CGDI partners to advance the overall development of the CGDI
Participants
The CGDI IP project, led by GeoConnections, included public sector and private sector participants.
Public sector participants came from Natural Resources Canada, Statistics Canada, Environment Canada, Elections Canada and government organizations in Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, Quebec, Ontario, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia.
Private sector participants came from Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.® (OGC) (Wayland, MA.,United States), CubeWerx (Gatineau, Quebec), LISAsoft Pty. Ltd. (Sydney, Australia), The Carbon Project (Burlington, MA., United States), Sunertek (Rimouski, Quebec)) and Galdos Systems Inc. (Vancouver, British Columbia).
Focus
The CGDI IP project focused on three types of national framework data: geographical names, the national roads network and municipal administrative boundaries. The functional scope of the project was demonstrated in the following use case scenarios: discovery, access and download of closest-to-source data by users; real-time transactional updates of provincial databases; and access to distributed information to support an emergency response situation.
Demonstration
The CGDI IP project ran from January 2007 to December 2007 and culminated with a live, real-time demonstration of the CGDI in action, in response to the Use Case scenarios. The demonstration was well received by the participants and a web cast on November 30, 2007 was attended by more than 500 people. This project also created a lot of international interest particularly in the United States and Australia. LISAsoft, one of the private sector partners in this project, hosted a web cast for Australia and New Zealand that was attended by more than 50 people.
This graphic below (generated during the demonstration) shows 100 place names accessed in real time over the Internet from each of several of provincial and territorial servers.
Conclusions
The CGDI IP project clearly demonstrated that mult-vendor technology solutions that are based on open standards can be used by federal, provincial and territorial to update their data and automatically make their up-to-date data available online in real time anywhere in Canada. The project also succeeded in building a collaborative team of CGDI partners to advance its development.
Project Outputs & Documents
This document describes the project methodology, execution and results.
This document is a technical description of the GeoRSS feeds used to notify data custodians of possible errors in the data and to inform data users of updates that the data custodians have made to the data holdings.
This document discusses WFS implementation issues that were discovered during the implementation phase of the project and makes recommendations for addressing some of these issues/problems.
- Project Overview Video (8 minutes)
This is a short video giving an overview of the project prepared by the OGC. To download this video in .mov format, right-click here and select "Save As".
This is a direct recording of the entire Webex conference attended by more than 500 people. This player must be installed to view the video
This is a brief summary of the project included in the January 2008 LIO Newsletter.
This is a press release prepared by Carbon Tools, that was posted on its web site in January 2008.
This is a Power Point presentation given at the November 30, 2008 Web Conference. It gives an overview of the project requirements, execution and results.
This document that was prepared in March 2007 (before the project execution began) to describe the project requirements and expected outputs.
This is a zip file containing the OGC RFQ documents for the CGDI IP. This RFQ was issued in April 2007 and responses to this RFQ were used to select the private sector participants in this project.