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SDI Snapshot - July 2019

Published Date
Author Gordon Plunkett

Curious about Indigenous place names in Canada? What did the Canadian Symposium on Remote Sensing and Geomatics Atlantics focus on this year? How can you launch a website in five easy steps? What’s new in the latest ArcGIS product releases? Find out what’s happening in Canada and globally in the world of Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) in this collection of the latest and most significant SDI news, data, and products.

SDI News

Government of Canada releases story map of Indigenous place names in Canada

An interactive story map of a selection of places in Canada with names that have origins in multiple Indigenous languages has been released by Natural Resources Canada and the Geographical Names Board of Canada. Stories from the Land: Indigenous Place Names in Canada contains a sample of names that shows the history and evolution of Indigenous place naming in Canada.

Canadian Symposium on Remote Sensing and Geomatics Atlantic 2019 wraps up

The 40th Canadian symposium was held in early June this year in New Brunswick and featured many Canadian and international researchers who presented and discussed their research on a variety of subjects from Northern application to water and wetlands to deep learning, satellite missions and more. In total, the conference hosted 195 delegates from Canada and the world.

Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) releases study on a national geospatial buildings layer

The purpose of this study is to provide NRCan with an overview of the available information related to the creation of a national geospatial buildings database. The objectives of this study include a review of existing Canadian efforts to produce geospatial building information; and summarize the federal, provincial, territorial, and commercial geospatial building information by evaluating availability, scope, geographical coverage, licensing, and available attributes.

Wildlife Conservation Society publishes story map highlighting Northern Ontario’s freshwater

The Water We Share is a story map that highlights the incredible freshwater ecosystems in Ontario’s Northern Boreal landscape. It explains how Wildlife Conservation Society is studying the major challenges facing more than 50 fish species that inhabit this vast and largely untouched region.

SDI Data

What is metadata?

Metadata is like an instruction manual for data. It describes the who, what, when, where, why and how for data. Metadata is important because it’s the record we rely on to find out how the data was created. That’s why it has to be detailed, dependable and well-documented. Here’s a step-by-step anatomy of metadata and the necessary stuff you need to incorporate in it.

New automatically extracted buildings in New Brunswick are now available on Open Maps

Natural Resources Canada has released more than 200,000 new buildings in New Brunswick for the automatically extracted buildings product. The data layer now includes more than 1.1 million buildings. New buildings data will be made available as new LiDAR data is acquired in Canada. Users can access the data and documentation from the Open Government Portal. WMS, prepackaged FGDB and Shapefile formats are available.

Geodata: A guide to geospatial data

Geodata is location information stored in a GIS or web GIS. By viewing data with a geographic component, we see it through a different and clearer lens. Geodata tackles the problem of location because geographic problems require spatial thinking. This article explains the types, themes and sources of geodata. As it turns out, there’s not one single type of geodata; instead, geodata exists in various forms such as vector and raster geodata.

SDI Products

How to launch a website in five steps

With ArcGIS Hub, users can create unlimited sites and pages to share content internally or with the public. For example, users can use a site to create a single access point for sharing authoritative GIS data with various teams. Or, users can create a website to share public projects and updates with the community.

2019 ArcGIS product updates for Q2

Here’s what’s new in the various latest ArcGIS product releases—in mapping, visualization, analytics, and more. Products include ArcGIS Enterprise, ArcGIS Excalibur, ArcGIS for INSPIRE, ArcGIS GeoEvent Server, ArcGIS Hub, ArcGIS Image Analyst, ArcGIS Image Server, ArcGIS Online, ArcGIS Pro, ArcGIS StoryMaps, Collector for ArcGIS, Drone2Map for ArcGIS, Insights for ArcGIS, Survey123 for ArcGIS, and Web AppBuilder for ArcGIS

About the Author

Gordon Plunkett is the Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) Director at Esri Canada. He has more than 30 years of experience in GIS and Remote Sensing in both the public and private sectors. He currently sits as a member of the Community Map of Canada Steering Committee, GeoAlliance Canada Interim Board of Directors, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Technical Committee, the Canadian General Standards Board (CGSB) Committee on Geomatics, the University of Laval Convergence Network Advisory Committee and the Advisory Board to the Carleton University Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre. During his career, Gordon has worked on projects in more than 20 countries and has contributed to numerous scientific conferences and publications. At Esri Canada, he is responsible for developing and supporting the company’s SDI vision, initiatives and outreach, including producing content for the SDI blog.

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