Oxford County, Ontario, Receives Award for Geospatial Portal Containing Agricultural Information

Oxford County, Ontario, received an Award of Excellence at ESRI Canada's annual ESRI Regional User Conference in London today. Alex Miller, President of ESRI Canada, presented the award in recognition of the county's efforts in creating an interoperable geospatial portal. The portal provides the agricultural community with data and maps for nutrient management planning, environmental farm planning, applying for incentive funding, and addressing local zoning provisions. More than 200 GIS professionals were on hand for the presentation, which was one of the highlights of the conference.

"With the county of Oxford's geospatial portal, organizations have made their GIS data available to the agricultural community through a one-stop Web application," said Mr. Miller. "While the Map Your Farm is the window to the data, organizations supplying data can maintain and host their data through their own Web map services. The Map Your Farm application provides all of the data and maps from participating organizations in one location."

In 2005, through an innovative project sponsored by GeoConnections, the county of Oxford, together with private sector partner, ESRI Canada, and several government sector organizations have adopted new federal standards in geospatial Web service interoperability, published by the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure (CGDI). The project has resulted in the re-engineering of Oxford County's Map Your Farm application to support Web Map Services (WMS) and Web Feature Services (WFS). It has also supported the creation of WFS and WMS services by project partners to host data that was previously hosted at Oxford County.

In order to offer this Internet mapping site, the Oxford County previously needed to acquire digital geospatial datasets from Conservation Authorities, provincial ministries, and federal government departments. This acquisition of data was time-consuming, as it required negotiation of data licenses with each organization, transfer of data sets, and on-going provisions to ensure that updates to the data are provided to the County to maintain currency of information.

Today, the county's Map Your Farm remains the access point into this data but some of the datasets are hosted by other government organizations, and offered through their own Web map services as part of the portal. The result is that farmers and others can easily view and print maps of their properties showing information hosted from map services from different government organizations.