ICIS Cadastre – 1 Million Parcels Served

The ICIS Cadastre parcel layer is now one million parcels strong – representing one half of BC’s land base. ICIS is ahead of schedule 1 year into its 3 year rollout plan! 90 of 189 local government jurisdictions are represented with parcel updates delivered directly from operational systems to ICIS each week through ICIS’ GeoShare infrastructure.

In 2011, we focused our data acquisition efforts on Vancouver Island and on a number of volunteer jurisdictions in the Okanagan and Lower Mainland. In 2012, ICIS will initially work on completing the Lower Mainland while continuing to work with those jurisdictions elsewhere throughout the province who volunteer to automate their data deliveries.

GeoBC’s Parcel Fabric Section, compilers of the Integrated Cadastral Fabric (ICF), contributes much of the ICIS Cadastre data – wherever ICIS member jurisdictions have adopted the ICF as their parcel base.  In 2011, GeoBC established new compilation and maintenance relationships with the municipalities of Esquimalt, Duncan, Ladysmith, Tofino, Canal Flats, Cranbrook, Elkford, Radium Hot Springs, and Sparwood.  GeoBC is continuing to collaborate with local and regional governments in 2012, with parcel enhancement and compilation work planned in the East Kootenay, Kootenay Boundary, and Columbia Shuswap Regional Districts and the municipalities of Lake Country, West Kelowna, Valemount, 100 Mile House, Trail, and Grand Forks.  In addition, the GeoBC team is planning to engage in partnership planning discussions with ICIS members in the Alberni-Clayoquot, Comox Valley, Strathcona, and Fraser-Fort George Regional Districts.

ICIS is also mobilizing a stakeholder group to look specifically at ICIS change detection services and to pilot a number of proposed enhancements to the ICIS Cadastre data model. The stakeholder group will be composed of parcel data producers, distributors, and consumers and will test and validate ICIS change tracking services prior to rolling them out to the membership at large.  Look for updates on this service throughout the first quarter of 2012.

For program inquiries, please contact the Research and Development Coordinator directly and check here for periodic updates.

Okanagan Road Trip

Steve and Paul spent two great days in the Okanagan November 7-8, meeting up with old friends and making a few new ones, as part of ICIS' ongoing GeoShare tour.

Our first stop, with Dave, Eric and Brian at Central Okanagan Regional District, was a working session to update the GeoShare script to handle address delivery. An early season snowfall did not deter us from our task and we successfully implemented weekly delivery of parcels and addresses.

At our next stop, in West Kelowna, we met with Wayne, Kevin and Janet and learned a lot about their GIS ramp up plans along with their collaborative work with GeoBC to identify positional accuracy improvement opportunities within the cadastre and to implement an enhancement program with ICIS CivicSpatial funding. West Kelowna is also converting their address data to populate AddressBC in the coming weeks!

Day two took us down to Penticton, where Tim hosted us at the Regional District of Okanagan-Similkameen. Tim was an early adopter of the GeoShare toolkit, and we we talked about AddressBC delivery options (also beekeeping and honey cultivation - Tim's 'other' job!). Tim's work on address conversion will dovetail nicely with an internal initiative to provide GIS data for their new Fire Dispatch service provider.

We wound up our tour with Kristin at the City of Penticton, who shared with us her plans for migrating from a CAD-based environment to an enterprise GIS. ICIS GeoShare tool implementation will provide two-way data flows for the City's GIS.

We want to thank our hosts very much for letting us into your workspaces and sharing your time and needs with us. These face-to-face sessions are essential to building the relationships at the heart of our society and for ensuring that ICIS Operations maintain the pulse of our members.

ICIS Cadastre Count Climbs to New Heights!

There are now more than 900,000 parcels available in the ICIS CADASTRE layer, providing members with an up-to-date, highly standardized, and common parcel map for almost half of British Columbia. This data is refreshed every week through ICIS’ GeoShare infrastructure which provides for the automated delivery of member data from operational systems distributed around the province to the ICIS web portal and out to data consumers.

Recent additions to the ICIS CADASTRE include parcels from Fraser Valley Regional District (ICIS’ newest local government member), from open data catalogs provided by the District of North Vancouver and Langley Township, and from GeoBC’s partnership compilation projects with Duncan, Ladysmith, and Tofino.

The ICIS team is busy working to incorporate parcels for the rest of the Province. We are helping a number of local governments configure GeoShare templates to match their specific operational configuration and to include their updates in the ICIS CADASTRE. New open data portals are coming online all the time, providing fresh opportunities for access to current parcel information. GeoBC is engaged with many municipalities – from Alberni-Clayoquot to East Kootenay – to improve the existing cadastre and to establish a single-custodian workflow. 

ICIS has targeted December 2013 for completing the automation of the ICIS CADASTRE.  We have reached the half-way mark through 30% of the timeline. With our active ICIS member participation facilitated by our GeoShare infrastructure, emergent Open Data initiatives, and active GeoBC compilation partnerships, we are confident of meeting our schedule.

Local Governments embrace ICIS as BCSpatial Users!

Is there value for local governments in attending the upcoming ICIS User Conference? Absolutely!

Historically, local government ICIS members have seen themselves more as data contributors. This paradigm is shifting as more and more local governments reap the growing benefits of ICIS membership. 

BCSpatial roll out: The ICIS technical team is travelling the province meeting with local governments to further the roll out of BCSpatial. Every on-site visit results in the provision of tools to automate the delivery of the contributed data sets. The parcel data sets are validated to ensure that every registered parcel is included and that the legal description is complete.

AddressBC in production: AddressBC, as part of BCSpatial, is in production and provides online tools to contribute and maintain address data at no cost. The ease to utilize the application is getting rave reviews.

CivicSpatial Grant program: CivicSpatial funding for local governments is readily available for all jurisdictions who embrace initiatives to improve address and cadastre data. Recently, the application remittance is growing exponentially.

Learning more about leveraging these benefits as an ICIS member is the growing question from local governments. The upcoming ICIS User Conference is the perfect venue for responding to this question fully. Register now @ http://www.civicinfo.bc.ca/event/icisuserconference2011.asp!

ICIS Cadastre - The Value of Collaboration

What is the ICIS Cadastre and what value does it provide?

It is a parcel fabric assembled from the best available cadastral information provided by local governments and the Province of BC. It is meant to be a one-stop resource for parcel data province-wide that ICIS members can use as a common cadastral base. It is multi-custodian and multi-user.

The notion of a "Collaborative Cadastre" for BC has broad appeal. It's also a bit of an oxymoron.

On the one hand, it is the standards that users can expect from a provincial cadastre - such things as a consistent data model and a consistent refresh/update cycle - that provide significant value.

On the other hand, collaboration involves voluntary participation. Ensuring consistent adherence to these data qualities across all data providers is a tall order, particularly where investments have been made in longstanding business processes and alternate standards.

ICIS employs a number of techniques to facilitate data standardization. We set the bar low with minimum specifications on the premise that gradual improvement over time is more likely to provide both short-term benefit and long-term quality. We provide financial incentives and technical support to assist members in transitioning to our desired standards, and we use ETL technology to translate from member specifications to ICIS specifications.

However well ICIS facilitates the process, the mass adoption of a cadastral standard is a slow process and will certainly produce data of some mixed quality along the way.

But rather than let this fact alone define the value of the ICIS Cadastre, there is another quality that I think should be considered alongside the qualities of the data itself: the value of collaboration.

Collaboration means that the cadastre may vary in quality from region to region. But its construction by many hands also means that it has many committed users. One of the principal functions of the cadastre is that it is a common reference - a framework for other mapped assets. Different agencies managing different assets can better share spatial information if they are both referencing the same base. The value of collaboration means that different agencies can develop a greater trust in how each others' data will relate to their own.

The ICIS Board has recently highlighted the value of collaboration as a key requirement for the ICIS Cadastre. ICIS is, after all, a collection of different organizations whose data sharing with each other underpins most of their business interactions.

This means that where ICIS has multiple sources of cadastral data, the source used for the ICIS Cadastre will not depend upon the quality of the data alone. We will also factor in the commitment to maintenance and automated delivery and the extent to which ICIS members agree to use it as deciding factors.

In these cases, how much does it matter which source is selected for inclusion in the ICIS Cadastre? I think the answer lies in how much value you place on collaboration. BC Assessment intends to use the ICIS Cadastre as the basis of its Assessment Fabric - the provincial index to the tax roll. Utility companies intend to use the ICIS Cadastre as their land fabric, aligning their utility infrastructure in reference to it.

I'm hopeful that a negotiated arrangement can be reached where there are multiple suppliers of the cadastre, for the benefit of all parties...

Nanaimo Regional District Delivers!

The Nanaimo Regional District has been delivering its cadastral and address data to ICIS with an automated process for several years now. Last week, ICIS worked with Tom Sohier and his team to upgrade the district's script infrastructure to better dovetail with ICIS' data assembly and reporting processes. The result? ICIS Cadastre now includes Nanaimo Regional District parcels current to within a week.

Thanks to Tom and his team for the quick turnaround!

ICIS Cadastre now has more than 300,000 parcels under weekly refresh.

ICIS Cadastre - Data Model Updates

The ICIS Cadastre data model has undergone a few tweaks this week in response to user feedback.

- LOCALAREA: formerly 'LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREA', this attribute has been renamed for consistency with other layers in the ICIS database. Localarea values have also been standardized for consistency with other layers and are populated on the basis of who has provided the data and how they define their own jurisdiction(s). The ICF AREA attribute, by contrast, provides a similar jurisdiction designation, but is populated according to how the Integrated Cadastral Fabric designates jurisdictions. Every parcel has a LOCALAREA value; parcels that can be associated with the ICF have an ICF AREA value.

- GEOMETRY_SOURCE: a new attribute that lists the member who has provided the spatial data. Contributing local government and regional district agencies are named; ICF data is contributed by GeoBC. This attribute provides a counterpoint to ATTRIBUTE SOURCE, which lists the source for the parcel attribution (GeoBC for standardized Master Parcel Table attribution or the contributing member).

- PARCEL DESCRIPTION has been renamed from ICF PARCEL DESCRIPTION. in recognition that this attribute may be sourced from the ICF or from a local government member.