Principles of Data Governance

Owned by Jonathan Bailey (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Sept 20, 2018
2 min read

Definitions

Data manager – an individual who is responsible for the governance of a dataset
EGIS – Transport Canada's Enterprise GIS
External GIS datasets – GIS datasets that are owned by persons or organizations outside of Transport Canada
FGP – Federal Geospatial Platform

Core Principles

  1. Cloud first: Transport Canada GIS data managers should seek first to host their data in the EGIS cloud environment.
  2. Open by default: Transport Canada GIS data managers should share their data as broadly as possible (see Levels of Data Sharing).
  3. Platform only: As much as possible, the EGIS team does not own GIS datasets.
  4. Services: A note here that the priority is to access data as services, rather than as downloadable files.

Transport Canada GIS Datasets

  1. Managers of Transport Canada GIS datasets will remain managers of those datasets.
  2. Where practicable, the EGIS team will facilitate data managers in moving their datasets into the EGIS cloud infrastructure
  3. Where this is not practicable, the EGIS team will facilitate data manageers in publishing links to their GIS datasets hosted on premises. Note that there is currently not a suitable link from the cloud back to on-premises servers.

External GIS Datasets

  1. As much as practicable, EGIS does not host external datasets. External datasets are normally accessed as services through links via FGP or ArcGIS Online.
  2. In some cases, EGIS may link directly to external services. Where practical, EGIS may request to the data manager that the service be made available via FGP or ArcGIS Online.
  3. In some cases, EGIS may host datasets owned by external data managers, where those data managers have not made the dataset available in a format that meets Transport Canada's requirements. Where practical, EGIS may request to the data manager that the dataset be made available in a format that meets Transport Canada's requirements.

An example of one such case is the National Road Network (NRN). The NRN datasets are owned by Statistics Canada, and are available via the Open Government Portal as KMZ, shapefile, and WMS. In order to conduct analyses such as spatial buffering on road segments, the data must be available as a feature service (WMS is not suitable for this purpose). In this case, EGIS could use the NRN shapefile data to create a hosted feature service in the EGIS environment. However, EGIS would also request that Statistics Canada make the NRN data available as a feature service.

Data Suitability

  1. Data managers determine the suitability of their GIS datasets to be shared via the EGIS cloud platform, according to the core data governance principles.
  2. Data consumers determine the suitability of datasets to for their purposes.
  3. Metadata is the mechanism by which data managers and consumers communicate about the suitability of GIS datasets for particular purposes.

Levels of Data Sharing

  1. Private: accessible only to the data manager
  2. Group: accessible by a group as determined by the data manager
  3. Organization: available across Transport Canada
  4. Federated: available across the Government of Canada via the Federal Geospatial Platform
  5. Public: available to the public via the Open Government Portal (and possibly via ArcGIS Online – TBD by FGP)