Garner Technology

My compatriot, Paul van Nieuwkuyk at CartoSmart GIS, and I have been working with the Town of View Royal over the past few months implementing their GIS.  Core to the implementation strategy was the use of published data models to ensure that the Town took advantage of other’s experience and were following a best-practice approach.  To that end, we implemented the AddressBC point-based addressing model  and are the first in BC to do so.

The data for View Royal’s address points were seeded from annotation in an AutoCAD drawing file.  Using extract-transform-load (ETL) tools, annotation labels were converted to points using the label insertion location as the seed point.  Attribution was added through a combination of analysis of street annotation and data from the Town’s property database.  Verification, which is on-going, has gone through a series of passes to the Planning and Engineering Departments with a final review by the Fire Department.  Errors have also been corrected through the creation of a new address label annotation layer that is linked to the address attributes in the data model.

The approach taken for View Royal is sufficient to meet the minimum standards for AddressBC.  The Town intends to take full advantage of the capabilities of the model including multi-location addresses (such as condominiums, town houses and mobile home parks access points and buildings [already using points for mobile homes, etc.]) in the future.  It’s also important to note that this is an operational implementation, that is, the Town will not only publish its addressing data in the AddressBC format but also manage its address data in this environment.

Through the course of the work we’ve found a number issues and challenges that AddressBC will no doubt focus on as they near formal roll-out to local governments in BC.  In particular, the data model requires more documentation and specifications around field values (domain values in the ESRI world) before it is ready for mass adoption by GIS departments in BC.

In the end, we like the flexibility the model provides the Town to capture address data by removing address information from the property parcel (where it is usually kept).  It will serve the View Royal well into the future.

Also see: View Royal First Municipality in BC to Adopt AddressBC Data Model