Location: Canada

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Parts of the world will become virtualized as time and people arise to tackle them.  If you are working on any particular location and are willing to be listed here, please let us know!

History

• For many years, access to Canadian geodata was limited and/or expensive.  Finally in 2007 all the data was liberated!  See press coverage, Canada drops licenses and adopts free model for map data.

Data Sources

• Natural Resources Canada is the main data agency
  • the Centre for Topographic Information (CITS)
  • GeoConnections - a "national partnership initiative working to build the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure (CGDI) which will make Canada's geospatial databases, tools and services readily accessible on-line."
  • GeoConnections Discovery Portal
  • Canadian EOSD Images
    • LandSat4/5 mosaics at 250m, false-color (bands 7, 4 and 2), TIF or ECW format.
    • Full uncompressed image is 640MB. Projection is LCC, fairly few clouds.
  • GeoGratis - distributes geospatial data of Canada, without charge
    • includes vector data, imagery, vegetation and land-use data
    • the relationship to GeoBase is unclear
    • Matt Wilkie says: "If you already know what you're looking for, skip the 20-clicks interface at the GeoGratis home page, and dive straight into ftp://ftp2.cits.rncan.gc.ca/pub/geogratis/bndt/"
  • Vector data: CanVec dataset provides data at the 1:50,000 and 1:250,000 scale and includes tens of thematic layers with numerous attributes
• GeoBase is another government source of free data.  They have:
  • Administrative Boundaries, Elevation Data, Geographical Names (toponymy), Landsat-7, and Road Network (NRN)
  • the elevation is available at 1:50,000 scale
    • which is generally .75 arc-second resolution
    • which is roughly 15m x 23m in the south of the country
    • the file format is a "modified" USGS DEM, readable by VTBuilder / vtdata
  • coverage is not complete, but does have most of the country
• Road Network File (RNF)
  • product of Statistics Canada, with a very generous, although lengthy, "unlimited use" license
  • distributed as .shp, .tab, or in some GML-based format
  • fields include street names, type and direction (e.g. "Ave", "NE"), address numbers, and class (basically "street" vs. "highway")
  • intended for use in the Census, lacks topology, width, lanes, and other fields that would make it useful for visualization
  • how does this differ from GeoBase's National Road Network?
• an older elevation format sometime encountered is CDED, "Canadian Digital Elevation Data"
  • CDED spec (pdf)
  • ground spacing of the points is strange, since it is geographic, and Canada has such high latitudes
  • confusingly, GeoBase also refers to their "modified" USGS DEM as "CDED"

Community

• The Canadian GIS blog links to many interesting data sources around the country.

Alberta

• The Leica Virtual Explorer product line had a demonstration dataset of Calgary, AB.
• Was downloadable from virtualleica.com: a 3.7MB installer and links to two Calgary scenes.
  • However, when i tried it (March 2006) i only get an error message about "Desired scene does not exist".  Other folks have tried and failed as well to get it to launch.

British Columbia

• In 2005, Tyler Mitchell assembled a nice VTP dataset of Bugaboo Provincial Park and surrounding region. (snapshot)
  • Please try downloading it with Bittorrent: bugaboos.zip.torrent (14.6MB)
  • Simply download the archive and add it to your VTP Data paths. You can explore it yourself, or try the included animation path.
    The texture is supplied in two sizes: 4k tiled, and 8k tiled. To switch to the 8k tiled, change your Terrain Parameters: Texture: Tile size from 1024 to 2048. That is, if your graphics card can handle 64 megatexels.
• The City of Nanaimo, BC, on Vancouver Island, has been especially active
  • The site earth.nanaimo.ca provides some of its city geographic info for use in Google Earth on an experimental basis
  • Mar. 10, 2008 article in Time: How Google Earth Ate Our Town
• Vancouver
  • The city is committed to freely sharing its data in accessible formats and in September 2009 opened their Open Data Catalogue Beta, where you can find and download the data (shp, kml, csv, xls, dwg, ecw, Mr. Sid)

Manitoba

• As of 2003 (well before the rest of the country) Manitoba provided all of its geospatial data free of charge for unrestricted use!
• site: Manitoba Land Initiative only requires free registration
• it has: a vector base map, 100m DEMs in a MapInfo format, a few LandSat7 images with each band in a separate TIF/SID file, Geographical Names as a SHP file, Land Use, some GIFs showing street layout of small towns, 1:20,000 "topo maps" actually in SHP format, roads, and other GIS layers

Ontario

• A LIDAR scan of Ottawa exists with ~100 million points, colorized
  • It was probably collected by Canadian company Neptec Technologies Group (in 2006-2008?), as part of "Urban Reasoning and Geospatial Exploitation Technology (URGENT) program undertaken by DARPA": "Neptec primed the collection of a high-resolution 3D data of Ottawa which has since become the standard for geo-referenced 3D urban data sets."
  • A company called DaytaOhio, the "Wright Center for Data", was providing licenses to the dataset at one point. They were merged into the Wright State Research Institute in 2011.
  • It is the data used in the paper Shape-based Recognition of 3D Point Clouds in Urban Environments (Princeton, 2009)
  • Makai Voyager Demo includes streamed serving of it as a free example dataset (released August 2011, led by John C Anderson).  CoViz 4D has also used it as an example.
    
  • Not to be confused with LIDAR of Ottawa County, Ohio (which is online, 3.4GB, uncolorized)
  • In January 2013, an Ottawa city employee stated, "The City does have LiDAR data (from 2006) but unfortunately, we are under strict licensing restrictions and cannot share the data." They say that GeoDigital is the owner.
• Back in 2003, the town of Oakville put online an amazing web map engine with a detailed view of the town that started to resemble 3D rendering (non-realtime).  Tourism View of Oakville [oakvillegis.ca, 2003, no longer online]:
  

Yukon

• some completely free 30 meter DEMs are available from Geomatics Yukon (see about the DEMs)
• Matt Wilkie is the person chiefly responsible for the Yukon DEMs, and created VTP scenes from them, along with seamless Yukon Landsat-7 satellite mosaic by Geomatics Yukon
• Vegetation: whe most visible species in the Yukon, according to Bruce Bennett, Botanist: "The most visible species in the valleys is likely White Spruce (Picea glauca) throughout the territory except for mountains and far north, Trembling Aspen (Populus tremuloides) in drier and more open sites, Lodgepole Pine (Pinus contorta) in the southcentral and southeast Yukon and perhaps Red Willow (Salix pulchra) in the mountains and Cottongrass (Eriophorum vaginatum) in the wet sedge meadows of the north."

Prince Edward Island

• Complete Digital Airphoto library for the years 1935, 1958, 1974, 1990 and 2000 of the province of Prince Edward Island, Canada can be found and downloaded from their website.