November 13th, 2019 GIS Day in STATCAN

Owned by Jiehua Yi (Unlicensed)
Nov 18, 2019
2 min read

This is the first time that several federal departments are involved in GIS DAY hosted by STATCAN. Last year this event was internal to STATCAN only. For next year’s event, it is being said that there will be another department to host it. It is good for GIS people to participant in the event and share the GIS work stories among different departments. You can go the the talks during the day, 15 minutes each, given by the departments, and you can discuss with the technical people who have setup demos in the booths with posters. The following is my takeaway from this year’s event:

  1. TC NASP group captures aerial photos like flood, and sends them to GOC (Government Operation Center) for consumption. GOC has many web mapping projects which gather and utilize the info from different departments. Our eGIS system can present NASP’s data to TC users.

  2. CHS-ENC charts, DFO suggested to use vector only, as it has more info than the rasters which are paper images. Raster charts are being slowly dropped. On FGP, there is a CHS-ENC charts viewer, as a basemap layer, with low resolution.

  3. STATCAN has been using FME for quite long time. They are moving away from FME Server, to Python. The reason is that all the underline algorithms FME uses are open source, in GDAL. Calling the APIs in Python will make the FME functions available. Besides, they are looking at DASK, and OSGEO (google: OSGEO4W, W means for windows).

  4. DMTI Data:
    Indigenous Services Canada uses DMTI network to do network analysis to detemine drive time. The reason is that DMTI has pharmacies/health centers, while the dataset provided by other departments does not have that.
    They are looking for a replacement as DMTI costs 100k/year

  5. CANUE consortium, a company in Dalhousie, consolidates environmental data holding across Canada.
    Request data from them.

  6. Google: Octranspo → gtfs → developers → gtfs download, to download stops.

  7. National Road Network, gcgeo.gc.ca, an effort between STATCAN and Elections Canada, a WMS layer is available.

  8. Google: EODMS, for images

  9. To find data in STATCAN database, go to their website, and look at the data tab. They are searching their CODR database with thousands of tables.