BC Spatial

BC Spatial Kicks Off CRD Beta

2010-02-11T19:59:00.000-08:00

I am looking forward to meeting up with old friends and new colleagues alike at tomorrow's BC Spatial workshop, the official kick-off to the program's beta rollout in the CRD.

The whole team is very excited about the convergence of the AddressBC and BC Spatial data integration programs and at the level of interest and enthusiasm for collaboration that we've seen from all of our member segments. We hope that this session becomes a blueprint for meeting with all of our other members in the upcoming months.

For those of you who just can't wait, check out the slide deck for my slice of the agenda.

PM to G8 or ICIS?

2010-01-29T08:24:00.000-08:00

I left yesterday's ICIS Board Planning Session inspired by some very good discussion around focused engagement among the members leading to improved data quality and currency. The stars seemed to be further aligning when I turned on the radio to hear the PM put forth his views regarding collaboration among nations.

What really perked my ears was his use of the phrase Enlightened Sovereignty, which he defined as:

An expanded view of mutual interest, in which there is room for all to grow and prosper ... the natural extension of enlightened self-interest.

The basic notion here is that efforts and contributions made outside of one's own immediate self-interest will, in the end, result in improvements for everyone. It's a doctrine that has equal application for global economic recovery, disaster relief, and integrated parcel and address databases!

Many of our members (and some non-members) have been individually demonstrating their support for these ideals for some time. Yesterday, I saw it flourishing among the ICIS executive and it's our task as operational support to be its ambassadors in our outreach with the membership at large.

City of Vancouver Gift Wraps Parcel and Address Data For ICIS

2010-01-20T20:18:00.000-08:00

If you haven't already seen the City of Vancouver's Open Data Portal - their online distribution site for GIS data - now is a very good time as they've just launched version 2. This enhancement provides many more data layers in several common formats in a very intuitive, accessible and eye-pleasing format. Its sets a rich and impressive benchmark for municipal data sharing.

Vancouver has never claimed to be the first ones to embrace open data (they acknowledge trailblazing efforts by Kamloops and Nanaimo - and the District of North Vancouver has also released an excellent site), but they're certainly carrying the standard forward impressively. And here's the windfall for ICIS - a set of layers preconfigured to meet ICIS delivery requirements! Vancouver has pupose-built a number of data extraction scripts to provide ICIS with the parcel and address data that we require in the format and structure that best meets our needs. This level of service demonstrates real leadership in collaborative data sharing and contributes greatly to the goal of province-wide cadastral and address databases.

Vancouver Technical Presentation Announced

2010-01-19T19:50:00.000-08:00

ICIS has just accepted a kind offer from Safe Software to present on our innovative and interesting use of FME at an upcoming regional user meeting in Vancouver (March 29).

Don and Dale's morning session will surely be served up with their patented blend of illumination and fun, and we have the pleasure of sharing podium time in the afternoon with the City of Vancouver to share some user experiences.

I'm pretty excited about this one-two punch, which should give attendees a nice full spectrum story about municipal data prep and sharing and then how some users (us) are leveraging that hard work and data... I think it can provide a compelling example of how the right technology combined with the right attitudes can redefine data sharing from chore to a purposeful benefit.

I encourage you to check out the agenda and I hope to see all of you data producers, consumers and FME fans there!

2010 Project Charter Released for Comment

2010-01-12T11:34:00.000-08:00

Based on our findings from the 2009 pilot program and some implementation goals for the new year, we have updated the BC Spatial project charter for 2010. You can find it here. We will be reviewing the content at the upcoming ICIS Board Planning Session (January 28 in Victoria BC). Comments are encouraged at any time.

The pilot has landed... and is refueling for the next leg!

2009-11-19T09:45:00.000-08:00

The BC Spatial pilot phase has officially concluded; a summary of the work performed to date was presented at the recent ICIS Board Planning Session (October 29, 2009 in Victoria). Further details are available in the Project Report.

We are actively planning next steps in the run-up to the holiday season and are expecting to provide a 2010 rollout plan soon. Highlights will include a beta phase of automated data transfer, assessment and integration concentrating on CRD municipalities and existing automated data transfer clients in the first quarter.

Thank you also to many of you who have been providing us with specific business requirements for data assessment and integration, which is helping to define priorities for automation and reporting.

Data Assessment Update

2009-08-20T13:18:00.001-07:00

The data assessment program has continued its swing around the province and now includes the following regional districts:

Greater Vancouver
Capital Region
Cowichan Valley
Nanaimo Region
Alberni Clayoquot

The program will continue North up Vancouver Island before sweeping back to the mainland. You can generally follow the progress of assessments by tracking the 'quick nav' links in the assessment portal.

FYI - there spatial correctness section remains thin due to the absence of evidence for this theme; however, an index of Integrated Survey Areas (ISAs) has been posted. New surveys conducted within an ISA area are required to contain explicit spatial referencing on the survey plan.

Cadastral Data Assessment Portal Launched

2009-07-15T09:40:00.000-07:00

BC Spatial's first project milestone - a snapshot assessment of ICIS' cadastral data holdings - is nearing completion. Results are being posted to a freshly-launched data assessment portal. The portal allows users to interactively interrogate cadastral data qualities through a (Google) map display.

Initial data quality themes include:

Maintenance Profile - What is the vintage of the data? How varied/uniform is it?
Completeness - How completely does the data reflect the Provincial parcel registry (LTSA)?
Attribution - What standard identifiers and content are available?
Spatial Alignment - How well do the discrete data submissions fit together?
Spatial Correctness - How accurately do the parcels reflect real-world locations?

This last theme has not yet been tackled; one of our challenges during the upcoming pilot phase will be to identify and source authoritative information that can comment on the spatial accuracy of parcels.

The assessment results have initially been confined to the lower mainland (GVRD), where ICIS enjoys a healthy variety and volume of parcel data. As these analytical themes are confirmed (by you) and refined, additional areas will be assessed and integrated to the portal.

Please dig in and let me know...

What gives you the highest value?
What's missing?
Is anything unclear?

Your feedback will help us to tweak the data processing. It is our intention to stand on the shoulders of these results to focus ICIS' internal data management and reporting practices, and data quality funding program. It will also provide the firm foundation that we require for the establishment of standards in a subsequent phase.

We are Transformers

2009-06-16T20:11:00.000-07:00

Safe Software's recent user conference was an unqualified success, with good reviews coming in from around the web, including this one from the keynote speaker, James Fee, and this one from Directions Magazine. Lots of interesting news about the software and its development path, but even better for me, lots of great presentations by people integrating, standardizing, and sharing data in different ways.

Highlights for me:

Jason Birch from the City of Nanaimo gets my nod for most memorable quote: when answering the cocktail party question "what do you do?", he has taken to replying that he is a "Transformer" - a play on the FME objects used to manipulate data, but also an apt acknowledgment of how central data manipulation is for spatial data to "work" in the enterprise. It's really the core of what ICIS does for its members.

Michael Leierer described the WA-Trans project, which is aggregating, standardizing and presenting a statewide transportation network layer from disparate data sources (sound familiar?).

Mark Doring from con terra GmbH spoke about their firm's work integrating member data submissions to the European INSPIRE SDI, which has FME as the centerpiece of a model-to-model transformation infrastructure structured around minimal impact to data provider systems.

Also a lot of very interesting presentations that discussed leveraging cloud computing for data management and mega-map servers (Google) as a presentation context for localized data. James Fee's work with the New Orleans' Data Center provides great food-for-thought for organizations with limited tech staff and large data sharing needs (sound familiar?).

C U at the UC? ETL brainstorming in Whistler

2009-06-02T22:32:00.000-07:00

Safe Software is hosting its annual user conference next week in Whistler, and several members of the ICIS team will be there. Spatial ETL technology (extract, transform and load) lies at the heart of the BC Spatial project, and I'll be on the lookout to chisel away at some of my pet favorite questions:

What opportunities does the server technology provide for facilitating ICIS' load, integration and distribution processes?
Who else is leveraging this technology to provide similar solutions, what approaches have they taken, and what has been their experience?

The powerful data transformation capabilities speak for themselves as a natural fit to our challenge of building a consistent cadastre from disparate sources, but leave unresolved some practical and philosophical questions about where data standardization is best applied.

If you are planning to be in Whistler next week, I'd love to stew over some of these with you. If we don't bump into each other, you can reach me here to set up a meet!

The problems is... defining the problem!

2009-05-28T11:27:00.000-07:00

Top five questions about BC Spatial (I've been asked them and I've been asking them myself):

What is it?
What problem is it intended to solve?
How will you do it?
How long will it take?
What will it cost?

A detailed response is the business of the Project Charter. Let me talk about item #2 for this post; it's a natural starting point and precursor to the other questions anyway. Sadly, it's also the most difficult to answer with real consensus.

Here's a brief hit list of problems that I've heard attached to the BC Spatial solution:

Discrete and non-integrated sources of parcel data
Incomplete or high-latency publication of member data
Insufficient information about data (metadata) to determine fitness-for-use
Overlapping contributions from adjacent jurisdictions
Structural inconsistencies within and across datasets
Absent notifications of (detailed) spatial changes

In thinking about these issues, the historical tendency has been to focus on the data-related components and jump towards fairly obvious solutions: one single compilation program for parcels, please! or let me have my own standards as long as my neighbors and I agree on our boundaries! While these approaches have their merits, let's consider:

Many of us have witnessed versions of these very good ideas planned and even initiated before - only to fall apart or not gain traction. They're either massive re-engineering tasks requiring substantial commitment, participation and reconciliation and fall down through the sheer enormity of trying to satisfy all business requirements, or they become overly insular in their approach and fail to provide significant value.
Whose problems do these approaches solve? Some or all ICIS members? Data producers, data consumers or both? If there is conflict, who decides on the priority?

Common denominators and low-hanging fruit:

It seems to me that a reasonable approach to all of these problems is to address the needs that are common to all members (consensus ensured!), to quantify problems that are anecdotal right now, and to improve and standardize existing services that are already being relied upon. These are the guiding principles of the BC Spatial phase 1 work plan, which includes:

BC parcel data assessment - where are there data quality, overlap or redundancy issues? When we can see it and count it, we will be in a better position to decide what to do about it.
Automate data processing - get member data in, up, stitched, packaged and distributed through repeatable automation. Pilot the automation with a subset of members and datasets to understand the automation effort.
Standardize the database - not just the ol' parcel layer, but its metadata - how complete is it, what is its integrity, etc. Pilot the data model through the automation pilot.
Plan. Let's review what we've achieved and target further development on real assessment of data issues and quantitative statistics of service improvements.

I know there's a lot of opinion out there and I look forward to hearing it!

Ladies and Gentlemen, start your engines!

2009-05-21T13:04:00.001-07:00

Welcome to the BC Spatial blog where you'll find the latest news about ICIS' project to formalize, standarize and share the best available spatial data for members. For background information about BC Spatial check out the website at http://www.bcspatial.ca/.

Please feel free to make comments on any article in the blog. The project team will be using this area to inform everyone about the project but also provides you an opportunity to send us feedback. If you don't find what you are looking for then please contact me directly.