NRCan makes three data announcements
Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) has recently announced three developments with regards to data.
You can be among the first to see these important data announcements if you follow our news feed from NRCan. You can follow all these announcements as they come in on the bottom of our front page.
Screen grab of Canadian and International news and info feeds on GoGeomatics Canada front page.
Automatically Extracted Buildings
On Feb 26th, NRCan announced its new data layer on Automatically Extracted Buildings. This new data layer is based on information from height and elevation of the buildings that help support government emergency management priorities like flood and earthquake risk analysis. The new layer contains close to 1 million building footprints and will expand as LiDAR data becomes available across the country. Automatically Extracted Buildings data is available through the Open Government Portal, as WMS, Web Application and prepackaged FGDB and Shapefiles.
Elevation Data CDEM and CDSM
NRCan’s geospatial data extraction tool has new formats for Canadian digital elevation data announced on March 4th: ESRI ASCII raster format became available for the Canadian Digital Elevation Model (CDEM) and the Canadian Digital Surface Model (CDSM). The ESRI ASCII raster format specification is available here, and the exchange formats for point data are CSV (.csv) (comma-separated values) and XYZ (.xyz) (space separated values). Specification for both formats is ASCII gridded XYZ.
OGC GeoPackage for CanVec data
On the same day, NRCan announced a new format available for CanVec as part of increasing accessibility to geospatial data while eliminating costs for business. This format is an OGC GeoPackage for CanVec data, available through the Geospatial Data Extraction Tool. The OGC GeoPackage is an open, standards-based, platform-independent, portable, self-describing, compact format for transferring geospatial information.
If Canadian geospatial data is important to you, have you considered attending GeoIgnite 2019? GeoIgnite is the national event for Canadian geospatial data and services. At this event key stakeholders in government and industry will be discussing data and data standards. You won’t want to miss it!
