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Automated Route Planning for Meter Reading – City of Vancouver

The City of Vancouver collects water readings from thousands of residences and businesses, but has never optimized the pedestrian routes the readers take. Refractions developed algorithms to create the most efficient routes of the correct length for readers.

The British Columbia government was looking for regional-level environmental statistics. Refractions proposed a new approach to generating GIS summaries, using the power of a relational database and web tools to provide GIS analysis to users who previously had no access to it.

Refractions provides full-service support for the British Columbia Digital Roads Atlas – systems design, maintenance, data conflation, client service, and rapid response.

Refractions converted a legacy habitat modelling system based on ArcView 3.X to ArcGIS 9.2, and automated the workflow to provide faster turnaround time for model runs.

Line Cleaner – BC Ministry of Forests

The British Columbia Ministry of Forests needed a tool to conflate multiple roads databases into a single working layer. Refractions delivered the algorithms and a user interface based on the uDig platform.

Refractions developed an ArcMap extension to automate the calculation of standard reports joining a massive shape-file archive with a large Oracle database.

UN FAO needed a data collection tool that could run disconnected and didn't have a per-seat licensing cost. Refractions delivered a simple tool using the uDig desktop platform.

The Open Geospatial Consortium runs regular “testbed” projects to field-test new concepts in geospatial interoperability. Refractions was a part of the OWS-3 initiative, and built a uDig-based “GeoDSS” client to provide access to several other OGC standard services, including a prototype GeoVideo service.

The International Potato Center wanted to migrate their potato genetics modelling application to uDig and Eclipse RCP. Refractions prepared a one-week training course and delivered it on-site in Lima, Peru to a group of developers from around the world.

Western Forest Products wanted to move to an open source infrastructure to roll out internal data gathering applications. Refractions helped set up the initial infrastructure and built a template application for landslide reporting.

Hectares BC

A Collaborative Environmental Analysis System for British Columbia

Project Background
Scientists, researchers, environmental groups, government agencies and others carry out planning, assessment, reporting and decision making functions pertaining to BC’s environmental and natural resources. In doing so, standard GIS projects are used in which:

multiple data layers are collected and processed;
the layers are overlaid;
a number of variables of interest are summarized for summary areas of interest; and,
a report is written based on the summary numbers.

However, the first two steps are often highly redundant, with different groups collecting, processing and summarizing the same core data over and over and over. Worse, whenever the summary areas are changed, the whole process is often repeated.

To assist with the development of a science-based biodiversity strategy, Biodiversity BC contracted Refractions to carry out a GIS analysis and create summary information for the entire provincial landbase from about 30 input data layers. Rather than carrying out a traditional process, Refractions built a pilot project that compiled all the layer information into a relational database, using one database row to represent each hectare in the province – almost 100 million hectares in all. Refractions delivered the analysis information from this database, and was able to add new information to the analysis just by adding columns to the database, rather than by re-running the entire process. This work was started for Biodiversity BC in August 2006 was completed over several phases up until March 2007.

In early 2007 Biodiversity BC, on behalf of a broad partnership of government and non-government partners, submitted a proposal to the federal GeoConnections initiative, to turn this database analysis concept into a user-friendly system accessible to everyone with data available via OGC standard interfaces (WMS and WCS). The proposal was accepted, and the Hectares BC project began in mid-2007. The Result