Slashgeo

The Map Room shares the great news for Canadians, the digital topographic data will soon be free. From the internal email copied on the blog: "In response to demands from users for no fee access to framework geographic data and the increasing technological shift in the marketplace, Natural Resources Canada (NRCan), is pleased to announce that starting April 1st 2007, the Earth Sciences Sector (ESS) will change the way its Digital Topographic Data (DTD) can be accessed. ESS will initiate a change from a cost recovery environment to an environment providing no fee access to its current DTD products." Vector One provides interesting comments.

This post on the GDAL-Dev list reminded me starting this month, the Canadian datasets National Topographic Data Base (NTDB) CanImage and CanMatrix products will now be available at no cost only at the GeoGratis website. This is great news for Canadian citizens. CanMatrix are raster data of scanned topographic maps. CanImage is resampled Landsat-7 orthoimages. While the NTDB provides a wealth of information, offering about 110 vector layers covering all Canada at the 1:50,000 scale: " The National Topographic Data Base (NTDB) comprises digital vector data sets that cover the entire Canadian landmass. This product includes thirteen themes such as hydrography, hypsography and the road network (see also the Updated Road Network product [URN])." The NTDB will not be updated anymore since it's in the process of being replaced by the CanVec dataset.

Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) announced the availability of the new CanVec vector dataset, which is freely available to anyone. Here's the FTP/HTTP site to retrieve the data. This is huge positive news for Canadians. This follows the previous announcement of the NTDB, CanMatrix and CanImage availability to the public last April. This new CanVec dataset provides data at the 1:50,000 and 1:250,000 scale and includes tens of thematic layers with numerous attributes. The CanVec dataset also replaces the NTDB (the Canadian National Topographic Data Base) which will no longer be updated. I copied the announcement below. From the purpose statement on the website (link above): "CanVec aims to standardized and actualized representation of topographical phenomenon for the entire Canadian landmass. CanVec can be used to produce thematic maps, for web mapping as well as GIS applications. CanVec many attributes allow for extensive spatial analysis."

A colleague sent me a link to a text arguing why government spatial data shoud be free. The text focuses on the Canadian government spatial data policy. While it does not look up to date and seems rather one-sided, it still includes very interesting arguments. From the intro: "Since the 1980's the general trend has been towards cost recovery of [the Canadian] government information. At first glance, this policy appears to be a good way of sharing the costs of a government service among those who benefit from it, like a toll booth on a bridge or a user fee on an ambulance. However, there are significant problems with this approach." The same colleague pointed me to DataLibre.ca, a blog on the subject. Below I included links to numerous previous stories related to INSPIRE in Europe, OGC and GeoDRM, Canadian new free data and more.

Government of Canada's GeoBase announced the availability, beginning in January 2008, of SPOT 4 and 5 orthoimages over Canada: "A new information layer 'GeoBase Orthoimage 2005-2010' - a complete set of medium resolution orthoimagery based on SPOT 4 / 5 covering all of Canada south of the 81st parallel - will be launched in January 2008. The first SPOT images of this dataset were collected in 2005. Collection of the imagery is scheduled to be complete in 2010. By the end of 2008, the GeoBase portal will offer 1500 orthoimages, providing coverage of 25% of Canada's landmass. A total of approximately 5000 orthoimages will complete this project in 2011. The 'GeoBase Orthoimage 2005-2010' is aligned with the national road network and with the Landsat 7 orthoimagery. The SPOT 4 / 5 data includes five spectral bands: a panchromatic band with a resolution of 10m, and 4 multispectral bands with a resolution of 20m." Here's the Wikipedia SPOT satellite entry. Other Canadian free geospatial datasets linked below.