Develop geospatial applications

The Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure provides several resources for anyone wanting to develop a geospatial application:

• Framework data. The GeoBase Portal (http://www.geobase.ca) provides regional data including the National Road Network, Canadian Digital Elevation Data, Geographical Names of Canada data (toponymy), Canadian Geopolitical Administrative Boundaries, Canadian Geodetic Network, and Landsat-7 Orthoimage data. Similarly, GeoGratis (http://geogratis.cgdi.gc.ca) is a free data portal that provides national-scale data.
• Web services. CGDI web services include web map servers, web context documents, styled layer descriptors, web feature services, filter encoding and gazetteers. Module 6 provides more information about CGDI web services.
• The CGDI Web Map Service Client Component (CWC2). The CGDI provides an open-source, downloadable web map client development toolkit that consumes OGC web map services. With this tool, you can embed a web map viewer into your web application. For more information, please see http://geoservices.cgdi.ca/cwc2/index.html.
• The GeoConnections Discovery Portal application program interfaces. For more information about these APIs, please see the Guide to the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure located on the GeoConnections web site under Publications/Key Documents.

All of these resources are currently available. However, the CGDI is evolving quickly, and additional resources will likely be available by the time you take this online training. For the latest information, please refer to the GeoConnections web site at http://www.geoconnections.org.