Two Canadian cities win international awards for GIS portals

The District of North Vancouver is one of three cities to win a United Nations-backed award for disaster preparedness. North Vancouver, San Francisco in the Philippinies, and Santa Fe in Argentina were declared winners of the UN_Sasakawa Award for Disaster Risk Reduction in Geneva on May 12.

The UN’s citation explains that North Vancouver received the award for its Geographic Information System website where the public can access mapping, census, land, environmental, zoning, buildings and other information stored in the GIS. At the ceremony, North Vancouver Mayor Richard Walton said that the GIS on land and buildings had enabled engineers to identify 30 properties that needed remedial measures to make them less vulnerable in the event of a landslide, such as that which the city experienced in 2005.

The city of Brampton in southwestern Ontario received the 2011 Innovator Award from the Geospatial Information & Technology Association at its conference in Dallas, Texas on April 25. Brampton has transformed its internal and external websites to a Citizen Service Platform which allows the city staff to maintain the content themselves and enables citizen’s access to relevant information.