Road Atlas of BC

Overview

Introduction

GIS Innovations Ltd. has created the premier Roads GIS Database covering the entire Province of BC (the Atlas). The database is a “Single Line Street Centreline” style of file with a robust set of attributes that enable users to GEOLOCATE any address and ROUTE to that address; for nearly every assigned address anywhere in Province of BC.

The GIS Innovations Atlas is now the GIS data of choice in BC for use by local and provincial governments for a wide variety of applications including most 9-1-1 call centres in BC, disaster planning and response, web location services, address control, voter location, school service or hospital service planning, transit planning and operations, and more.

This Atlas does not replace databases like Cadastre , or TRIM (1:20,000 provincial base) , etc. Rather, this Atlas is a ROADS focused database that allows you to geolocate and route to virtually every address in BC. This roads data is completed with an up to date facilities and a robust basemap layers of GIS data.

We anticipate that this high quality database will meet each users’ needs in a reliable, timely, and very cost effective fashion. We started this Atlas in response to the high quality requirements for Street data for key users within government and utilities, and now this high quality GIS data is available to all potential users. We look forward to being responsive to and discussing your needs in the near future.

Methods and Maintenance

The core of the program is that GIS Innovations integrates reference data with GPS based field verification of essentially EVERY road in BC. To date, we have pur on over 600,000 km or driving for our field verification. There is no point to having a database, unless it is up-to-date, accurate and reliable. As such, the Atlas is aggressively maintained to meet the needs of our most critical users, the Public Safety Systems in BC. GIS Innovations works in close cooperation with the Province of BC, as well as with most local governments. Through this cooperation, GIS Innovations is advised in advance of most changes to the road system in BC. As roads are renamed, re-addressed or have their navigation characteristics changed, we implement those changes when they take effect. All these changes, in addition to the constant process of GPS verifying information, adding roads and expanding the back country road coverage results in a new release on or shortly after the first of every month. It is a physical reality that our GPS mapping vehicle can only be in one area at a time. The maintenance program is structured such that for the core of BC containing 85% of both the population and 95% of the growth has multiple field verified updates a year. As we said, the Atlas is actively maintained for the most demanding of users. For more detailed information regarding the scheduling of the GPS unit refer to the GPS Vehicle Schedule

The Database Provided

The Atlas is supplied "ready to use" in ESRI shape and/or MapInfo Tab file formats. Other formats are available upon request, such as Mid/Mid, e00, or anything we can readily translate into using FME . A small service fee may be charged for non-standard schemas or formats. Generally users purchase a suite of data from one of the roads data packages, road names, addressing (geocode), routing (navigation). A typical product delivery includes:

ROADS

· Geopositionally correct road centreline, to within 3m 65%, and 10m 99%. of the time.

· Road Naming Package: road class, road name, alias, highway route, exit_num
-OR-

· Road Geocode Package: the above plus address ranging (FromLeft, FromRight, ToLeft and ToRight), city and regional district
-OR-

· Road Navigation Package: the above plus speeds, stops, lights, turning restrictions, # lanes, direction of travel, barriers (height, weight, width), and more.

BASEMAP

· Smart Hydrography: coastal waters, lakes, rivers and island as intelligent (named, and ranked) features, sourced from Provincial data under license.

· Topograhphic Features, Rail, Transmission lines, airports, etc. sourced from Provincial data under license.

· PLACES

· The Places data is a collection of places of public interest, the kind of additional information commonly included in many other maps. Our Places data is based around the following kinds of places: transportation, public safety, civic structures, parks and recreation, education, commercial and industrial sites.

POLITICAL

· Localities, an interpretation of the community name (very unofficial), as a polygon layer

· Regional Districts, a course (unofficial) map layer of BC Regional Districts, as a polygon layer

· First Nations Lands, a course (unofficial) map layer of IR's, as a polygon layer

last updated: 13 June 2006, bj