Municipal and community planning in Canada's far north has some significant challenges. The Northwest Territories (NWT) is a land of contrasts, covering approximately 1,171,918 square kilometers of mountains, forests, and tundra threaded by rivers feeding thousands of pristine lakes. More than 40,000 people live amid this rugged natural beauty. The communities of the Northwest Territories are spread far apart across this enormous landmass, making travel costly and time-consuming and information and data sharing challenging.

Municipal and Community Affairs (MACA) is the department responsible for the administration of Commissioner's Land in the Northwest Territories. The department is headquartered in the city of Yellowknife, capital of the Northwest Territories, with seven regional offices and suboffices, all requiring access to community geographic land information. Additionally, there are community governments, aboriginal governments, other public sector departments and agencies, and the public that require access to this information.

The Administration of the Territorial Land Acts System (ATLAS) is a multiyear initiative to develop and implement GIS to meet the business needs of MACA. The vision for ATLAS is to "provide users with accurate and reliable maps and written information on every parcel of land within community boundaries, to be accessible territorywide and easy to use."

During the GIS business requirements phase of the ATLAS project, EBA Engineering Consultants' GIS Services Group in Yellowknife was contracted by MACA to develop and implement a Web-based GIS and mapping service (ATLAS) to support the short-term needs of land verification and land claim negotiations. An additional goal was to provide an opportunity for users and stakeholders to be actively involved with the ATLAS project and to witness firsthand the value of the concept.

Implementing ATLAS—From Data Collection to Web Delivery

Part of MACA's multiyear initiative to implement GIS involves the integration of Esri software, which is an industry standard and used widely across governments. EBA also uses Esri products; therefore, ArcIMS was chosen as the software that would best meet the requirements for implementing ATLAS. ATLAS was constructed on an ArcIMS platform with a customized interface and the loading of key layers for 10 NWT communities. One community was selected as a pilot to serve as a template in the design, development, and testing for the ATLAS Web site.

The initial step of the ATLAS project entailed staff at the Lands and Infrastructure Administration Division of MACA to assemble all data on a per community basis and deliver it to EBA's GIS team to prepare the data for delivery on the Web. A number of subprocesses were involved in carrying out the initial phase of the project:

• Data was provided as shapefiles translated from AutoCAD containing information for titled parcels, leased parcels, buildings, hydrography, transportation, contours, vegetation, and IKONOS imagery. This data was loaded into ArcView for examination. In addition, a data sheet detailing the entity feature classes, layers, and colors of the original CAD map drawings was provided by MACA.
• The data was organized into an appropriate directory structure with separate folders for each community, providing a logical starting point for delivery on the Web.
• Tuning and removal of unnecessary fields of data reduced file sizes to meet the needs of the application to be suitable for a variety of Internet bandwidths.

One of the key challenges of ATLAS was how to access the different community data via the Web. Upon examining and organizing the data for the pilot community, a framework for the map and a user-friendly front end needed to be built for the Web application. A front-end Web page was developed to serve as a portal to provide the user with quick access to a specific community. The user has the option of accessing a community either by selecting the community from a menu or by selecting it from an overview map. The front-end Web page also serves as an entry point for the User Tutorial, designed for users with low to nonexistent GIS skills. The tutorial provides the user with information on how to use the interactive map and all its tools and explains the details about the different data layers.

The map for the pilot community was constructed using the HTML Viewer on an ArcIMS platform. One of the benefits of using ArcIMS software's HTML Viewer is that it can be easily customized. The colors and logos of HTML Viewer for ATLAS were modified to correspond with the look and feel of MACA. The mapping functionalities of the HTML Viewer were also modified based on user feedback from MACA staff. From the data examination carried out in the earlier stages of the project, it was determined that certain data layers needed to be set to load at different scales upon launching the map in the Web viewer. This allowed for faster initial map loading times. Several predetermined queries were also custom built into the map, allowing the user to search for and retrieve the necessary data.

Upon completion of the front-end Web page and map for the pilot community, a thorough Web site quality assurance/quality control process was completed. Final edits and modifications were implemented to finish the framework for the remaining communities.

As a result of developing the ATLAS project based on a single pilot community, the remaining communities could be added in a very quick and cost-effective manner. ATLAS has proved very effective in providing public access to MACA's community parcel land information. The project was also beneficial in raising awareness of the benefits that Web-based mapping can have on integrating different types of data, such as cadastral, IKONOS imagery, and parcel attribute.

ATLAS is publicly accessible on the Web (www.gis.eba.ca/maca). For more information, contact Karen Warrendorf, EBA Engineering Consultants (e-mail: kwarrendorf@eba.ca, tel.: 604-685-0275), or Brad York, MACA (e-mail: Brad_York@gov.nt.ca, tel.: 867-873-7586).