Quebec, Canada: Esri Canada announced on 16th May 2012 that the company has been selected by Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) to lead the GeoFoundation Exchange project. The project is partly funded by the NRCan’s GeoConnections program, focuses on developing a prototype for an open, Web-based system that will enable cost-effective and efficient sharing of geographic basemap data across the country. The GeoFoundation exchange is essential to the creation and maintenance of the most current national Web basemap of Canada.
“Natural Resources Canada is working with private, public and academic organizations to facilitate the development of world-class geospatial tools and technologies,” said the Honourable Joe Oliver, Minister of Natural Resources Canada. “Open and accessible data is a key strategy of ours to increase the availability of information to Canadians, create socio-economic opportunities and enable citizens to participate more fully in the process of government.”
NRCan is bringing together federal, provincial and territorial governments and the private sector to collaborate and better meet the geospatial demands of Canadians. This collaboration will also help to effectively respond to critical priorities while reducing costs to government and private-sector companies.
Geographic information systems (GIS), combined with other technology, will be used to establish a federated infrastructure shared among all levels of Canadian government, non-government organizations, industry and academia. This will help increase productivity by automating the updating of data. The system will support bi-directional exchange of information, providing all agencies and the public with consistent, current and authoritative data for the national Web basemap.
Source: esri.ca
