5th Pan-Canadian Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) Summit
The theme of this year’s summit is “Responding to the Needs of Northern and Remote Communities”.
Limited infrastructure in Northern and remote communities can limit access to tools and information that are foundational for decision making in areas such as land use planning, emergency planning and response, environmental monitoring, and general situational awareness. This year’s summit aims to discuss these limitations and highlight the innovations and opportunities to advance geospatial data discovery, access, availability, interoperability, and use in remote communities and the north.
Originally intended to be held in Yellowknife, NWT, this year’s summit will be held December 2 & 3 as a virtual webinar. Registration is free and open, and can be completed here. The summit is open to representatives of various levels of government, geomatics stakeholders, land-use planners, private industry, Indigenous Government Organizations, academic institutions, and users of geospatial information.
Spread over two days, thought provoking presentations and an interactive panel discussion will be held. Topics of discussion will include strengthening community-based technical capacity for regional land-use planning, web platforms for sharing research results on permafrost in Nunavik, First Nations Principles of OCAP®, and First Nations data sovereignty.
Keynotes will be given by Dr. Peter Pulsifer (Carleton University) and Dr. Nadine Alameh (OGC CEO).
The first SDI Summit was held in Calgary by GeoDiscover Alberta in conjunction with GeoConections in 2014 and coincided with one of the quarterly member meeting of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) while every subsequent SDI summit overlapped with the annual general meeting of the Canadian Council on Geomatics (CCOG). This allowed for representatives from jurisdictions across Canada, the federal government, private sector and other sectors to share knowledge, best practices and exchange ideas.
Since then, there have been three other SDI summits in Victoria, British Columbia; Whitehorse, Yukon; and Québec City, Québec. For more details on this year’s SDI Summit, please visit the NWT Centre for Geomatics
