About the GeoPortal
Indian and Northern Affairs Canada business activities are broad ranging, from social/education to capital asset infrastructure management to mineral development; conducted by teams of experts in regional offices from coast to coast to coast. INAC has a long history of using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) tools and geospatial data to deliver on its obligations and there are many examples of successful project deployments. The department has developed, over time, centres of excellence with regard to GIS and there are teams located in British Columbia, Northwest Territories, Quebec, Atlantic and the National Capital Region who are domain experts using data and technology to solve specific business problems and support the delivery of programs.
A normal evolution of these centres of excellence is their integration into a corporate geospatial infrastructure so that data and services can be shared and exchanged across centres, as well as with external stakeholders. The Department has therefore embarked on an initiative to implement a corporate Geomatics strategy. The INAC GeoPortal is a key part of the strategy that will make spatial data, tools and geographic visualization available to INAC and its clients. A Spatial Data Infrastructure forms a set of organizational and technical standard practices that allow data custodians to provide spatial data and services to users. The resulting geo-portal and data server infrastructure will provide direct value-add to a broad range of internal and external stakeholders. For future departmental business requirements this spatial server infrastructure will provide the framework for building enterprise GIS solutions/portlets allowing for the reuse of data and tools.
The INAC GeoPortal will provide a structure and a mechanism to begin to eliminate the duplication within the department and create better access to information for First Nations, the Canadian public and Other Government Department (OGDs) . The current infrastructure encompasses two major nodes: one in the National Capital Region and one in Yellowknife.
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