Atlas Plus for York Region, Ontario

Located north of Toronto and bordering Lake Simcoe, the Regional Municipality of York encompasses nine municipalities with over 980,000 residents, 25,000 businesses and 395,000 jobs. Covering 1,776 square kilo- meters, York Region provides services such as transportation, water, policing and human services for the area. In addition, York Region is responsible for growth management, which is where their relationship with Latitude Geographics began.

York Region initially engaged Latitude Geographics in 2006 to refine and adapt their existing web-based enterprise GIS in an effort to more efficiently disseminate data and applications among individual municipal governments. Collaborating with York Region’s Geomatics Branch, Latitude assisted in the migration from the existing GIS application to a new platform based on ArcIMS and ArcSDE 9.1. Maintaining the integrity of ArcSDE data and meta-data was critical, as was incorporating elements of performance, maintenance and extensibility into the project.

With extensive consulting, database design and application development, Latitude Geographics was able to complete the migration without interfering with ongoing internal and external stakeholder access to geospatial information.

In 2007, York Region along with some of its local area municipalities was awarded GeoConnections funding to develop a regional atlas for urban planning. Geocortex Essentials was selected based on its ability to leverage ESRI’s new ArcGIS Server technology along with its inherent functionality and flexibility. The goal was to develop a series of customized planning applications for York Region and its municipal partners that would allow for timely and consistent population and employment density calculations throughout the region.

“The delivery of complex calculation tools to all regional and local planners has been enabled through the implementation of this new infrastructure including ArcGIS Server,” explained Nancy Prout, Director of York Region Geomatics.

The objective in developing custom planning applications was to facilitate coordination and consistency among all the regional and local municipal planners and make density and intensity calculations efficient and accessible. The end result was Atlas Plus, a customized mapping and planning application designed to incorporate the basic tools of Geocortex Essentials along with an additional suite of functions and tasks tailored specifically to the requirements of York Region.

“One of several key benefits we identified for the project was the need to provide a consistent set of data and tools to all urban planners within the region, providing a single picture of growth and intensification. This will greatly facilitate the process of planning for the expected population growth while protecting key environmental areas,” noted Prout.

Atlas Plus was created with six unique mapping views, intended for different audiences and purposes. Its themes concern property, regulatory land use, density assessment, intensification and environmental monitoring. The functionality of each view is geared towards streamlining strategic planning and development activities among the nine municipalities. To further enhance user functionality, each of these views can be launched for a variety of mapping extents, including any individual municipality and the entire York Region. This allows the application to provide municipality-specific customization while also allowing users access to inclusive, comprehensive data for the Region as a whole.

Atlas Plus leverages data sharing technologies including Web Map Services (WMS) allowing each municipality to manage their data locally, while viewing and accessing their own and other municipal centrally. By leveraging Geocortex Essentials technology, Atlas Plus can facilitate resource sharing and aid in establishing consistency with common GIS standards and procedures.

“Web-GIS supports geographic information sharing and manipulation across a variety of platforms and spaces,” explained Prout, “so we decided to use this flexibility for planning across municipalities as large and diverse as those comprising York Region.”

[top]