Canadian GIS

The province of Prince Edward Island continues to do a great job at making their aerial photography available to the public and this interactive map tool is your key to finding aerial photography for anywhere in Prince Edward island that you can then use with ArcMap, MapInfo, Google Earth or any other GIS based software as well as other non GIS uses.

The Atlas of Canada recently published a beautiful new cartography product featuring the Canadian North in support of Natural Resources Canada and the Government of Canada’s Northern Strategy. The new bilingual map product (available either in paper or digital formats) features the vast geography of the north from approximately 50° latitude and above.

The Atlas of Canada provide free downloads of new map of the Canadian North in either JPG or PDF versions.

The GIS folks at the City of Niagara Falls have done a great job with their efforts of supporting open government initiatives by providing Canadians with data sets to use in their own GIS software applications and also for providing the Falls Viewer for those that do not have access to GIS software. If you have a need for data in the Niagara Falls region or just want to play around with available data sets then I recommend that you take some time and check out the data sets and applications provided.

Built and maintained by Information Services Corporation of Saskatchewan, GeoSask is a centralized open data website by the Provincial Government providing free online access to different types of maps and geospatial information related to the province of Saskatchewan. It features free downloadable GIS data (with a few exceptions) available from participating Government of Saskatchewan departments and agencies.

Check out the remarkable efforts that Service New Brunswick has been able to accomplish ensuring that their residents have access to good geographic information data sets as well as access to amazing free online web mapping tools for those that are not fortunate enough to have GIS related software.

If you are looking at generating maps related to the province of New Brunswick then I recommend that you check out these data sets as they will provide a stable building block to build a decent GIS with. And if you are not interested in doing any GIS work with New Brunswick data sets, then at least check out the GeoNB online web Map Viewer.

The City of Toronto has recently celebrated two years of online Open Data service and they have full intention on continuing to build on that success, by stating that they intend to add more data layers and will further develop their site. Data sets are provided in various standard downloadable file formats such as XLS, CSV, DGN & SHP. All data set contains basic meta info associated with them such as who created the data, date, format, projection, attributes, contact info etc. The bottom line here is the City of Toronto has granted the GIS community a royalty free, non exclusive licence to use, modify, and distribute any of their data sets that they continue to make available via their data catalogue.