{"id":365812,"date":"2020-08-26T17:07:58","date_gmt":"2020-08-27T00:07:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/?post_type=arcuser&#038;p=365812"},"modified":"2020-09-08T20:05:32","modified_gmt":"2020-09-09T03:05:32","slug":"york-region","status":"publish","type":"arcuser","link":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/arcuser\/york-region","title":{"rendered":"Geospatial Infrastructure at Its Best"},"author":1031,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"sync_status":"","episode_type":"","audio_file":"","castos_file_data":"","podmotor_file_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1041,10932,24992],"tags":[450481,1171,471512],"arcuser_issues":[471312],"class_list":["post-365812","arcuser","type-arcuser","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-collaboration","category-esri-user-conference","category-special","tag-geospatial-infrastructure","tag-open-data","tag-york-region","arcuser_issues-summer-2020"],"acf":{"short_description":"At the 2020 Esri User Conference,  Regional Municipality of York was honored for  creating a shared geospatial infrastructure.","pdf":{"host_remotely":false,"file":"","file_url":""},"flexible_content":[{"acf_fc_layout":"pdf","file":365862},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"At the 2020 Esri User Conference, the work of the Regional Municipality of York (York Region), was honored for its pioneering work in creating a shared geospatial infrastructure that epitomizes the conference theme of Connecting Our World. York Region is the first Canadian organization to win the President\u2019s Award.\r\n\r\nIn presenting the award, Esri president Jack Dangermond characterized the work of the municipality. \u201cIt\u2019s really geospatial infrastructure at its best,\u201d he said. Using Esri technology, York Region built a data cooperative that shares data, scripts, code, apps, workflows, and training among its constituent organizations.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;"},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":366052,"image_position":"center","orientation":"horizontal","hyperlink":"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=ExLzTv55_-E&list=PLTPUQcnsfm-pjPXeDfOgkwfFD-uHd0zoP&index=12&t=0s"},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"John Houweling, director of the Data, Analytics and Visualization Services Branch at York Region, accepted the award via video during this entirely virtual user conference. \u201cWhat a wonderful acknowledgment of our incredibly talented team working together with our partners. We are connecting our world here in York Region,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re doing this through a culture of collaboration that encourages sharing, breaks down silos, and puts our collective data to work.\u201d\r\n\r\nYork Region is located north of Toronto, the provincial capital of Ontario. It encompasses nine fast-growing cities and towns\u2014the City of Markham, City of Vaughan, City of Richmond Hill, Town of Newmarket, Town of Aurora, Town of Georgina, Town of Whitchurch-Stouffville, Town of East Gwillimbury, and Township of King as well as two district school boards and two conservation authorities. With 1.2 million residents, the region is one of Canada\u2019s largest municipalities.\r\n\r\nAlthough the region is being honored for a current project, the York Data Co-op, York Region has long recognized the value of GIS for improving government. In 1996, it formed the YorkInfo Partnership to help all its constituent entities benefit by collectively investing in GIS technology, data, and the people who apply both to improve government processes and services."},{"acf_fc_layout":"quote","image":"","text":"Enabling data access and sharing has been our core direction for years. Building trust in the data adds confidence in decision-making and ultimately results in more effective services.\r\n\r\n","author_name":"John Houweling","author_profession_organization":"Director of the Data, Analytics and Visualization Services Branch at York Region"},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"According to Houweling, \u201cEnabling data access and sharing has been our core direction for years. Building trust in the data adds confidence in decision-making and ultimately results in more effective services. The York Data Co-op takes this further by enabling partners to share apps and tools. This increases collaboration in common business areas.\"\r\n\r\nThe sharing aspect of York Data Co-op has been especially important for smaller municipalities that lacked the resources to support the adoption of spatial technologies. The Data Co-op provides a virtual Marketplace in which partners can locate digital assets using a familiar online shopping experience. GIS has been adopted by all service areas in the region and supports governance, housing, transportation, environmental protection, land use, forestry, economic development, public health, and water and wastewater management.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;"},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":365892,"image_position":"center","orientation":"horizontal","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"This effort was guided by a vision that would connect the various partners\u2019 GIS implementations, allowing access to digital assets to be controlled by those partners. This led to the adoption of a truly federated model\u2014a system of systems\u2014in which no partner is the central owner or distributor of assets. Sharing can occur between any partner, using Esri technology to facilitate collaboration.\r\n\r\nThis federated platform for sharing was built using ArcGIS Enterprise portal and ArcGIS Online, Esri\u2019s cloud-based data sharing, mapping, and analysis service, which gave partners a low-cost entry point to quickly and easily develop solutions.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe ArcGIS Online development environment is so straightforward that we\u2019ve literally been working things out on a whiteboard in the morning and then looking at a prototype online that afternoon,\u201d said Brendan Coles, GIS project specialist for York Region. \u201cEveryone gets excited when they see how quickly we can make things real.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe York Region Open Data portal and the Marketplace were built using ArcGIS Hub. Partners publish the digital assets that they wish to share by registering them with the York Data Co-op. These assets aren\u2019t physically copied into a central server. They remain behind each partner\u2019s firewall, where they are maintained so that assets are always current. The assets needed for a specific use are easy to locate because they are grouped based on function rather than asset owner. A defined legal and governance framework controls the use of YorkInfo Partnership resources.\r\n\r\nNot only does this structure greatly enhance opportunities for collaboration but it improves accuracy while saving time and eliminating the costs associated with maintaining redundant assets. Users never have to wrestle with determining which of many versions from many sources is the most current and authoritative.\r\n\r\nThe York Data Co-op provides a common infrastructure for delivering services, whether within cities, towns, and districts or across the region. This is enormously useful in situations that require municipalities to jointly manage operations such as water and wastewater management.\r\n\r\nAccess to the most authoritative data also promotes data-based decisions by ensuring accuracy and currency. This system provides one window into all the data and a single source of truth. Each asset\u2014whether it is a dataset, script, app, or workflow\u2014is documented with metadata identifying its source, extent, timeliness, and other information so that it can be used knowledgeably by other partners.\r\n\r\nProviding the Marketplace has another powerful benefit. Partners can incorporate the work already done by others, rather than replicating it, then build on that work to accomplish more. This support improves productivity and scalability for municipal GIS departments, whether those they are single-person shops or departments with many staff members.\r\n\r\nThis is especially valuable for smaller partners that have more limited resources that may lack the internal capabilities to develop these assets. This also makes deploying new apps more doable and less risky and enables larger cooperative activities between partners, such as using common data models.\r\n\r\nPartner data can be pulled into a variety of apps via APIs or into ArcGIS StoryMaps, used in ArcGIS Online maps and analyses, or pulled into work on the desktop using ArcGIS Pro. This approach supports the operations of individual municipalities by letting them choose how they use technology so that it works with, rather than disrupts, existing business processes.\r\n\r\nThis enables innovation, not for innovation\u2019s sake, but to improve processes and services that benefit residents of York Region. This includes a federated Open Data portal that provides York Region businesses and residents with access to government data. Although not all partners\u2019 open data has been connected yet, eventually any data shared by partners will be accessible and usable.\r\n\r\nYorkInfo Partnership will continue to grow. There are plans for incorporating other municipal service providers, additional levels of government, and organizations in the private sector, although that will require some legal and governance changes.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe data sharing that they\u2019ve undertaken lays down a solid foundation for leveraging new technology. Because this works well in such a diverse environment as York Region, it will encourage others to follow their path. It becomes a lighthouse for other municipalities,\u201d said Alex Miller, president of Esri Canada."}],"references":null},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.9 (Yoast SEO v25.9) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Geospatial Infrastructure at Its Best<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"At the 2020 Esri User Conference, the work of the Regional Municipality of York (York Region), was honored for its pioneering work in creating a shared geospatial infrastructure that epitomizes the conference theme of Connecting Our World. 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