Alberta Data Partnerships Ltd. (ADP) is pleased to announce the launch of the Open Data Areas Alberta Modernization project, supported by a $500,000 investment from Alberta Innovates under the Environmental Innovation program.
What is ODAA?
The current Open Data Areas Alberta (ODAA) initiative (www.opendataareas.ca) provides geographically defined zones across the province where no-cost, openly licensed geospatial datasets are freely available for evaluation, research, and innovation. The current six areas serve as a shared, no-cost environment where governments, industry, municipalities, Indigenous communities, researchers, and innovators can test and validate Earth observation (EO) and aerial data against consistent, authoritative ground-based information mapping.
What’s changing
This project modernizes the existing program in three ways.
1. Existing Open Data Areas will be refreshed with updated and expanded datasets.
2. The program will expand to include new geographic areas that are selected through structured stakeholder engagement.
3. The platform will integrate a new Registered Interests on Title Land (RITL) layer to link EO directly to legal land interests enabling more accountable, defensible, and operationally useful analytics.
Built for AI and the next generation of environmental intelligence
A central design goal of this modernization is to establish artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML)-ready data environments. By harmonizing environmental, terrain, infrastructure, and legal tenure data across defined geographic areas with consistent documentation and metadata, ODAA reduces the key barrier to applied AI/ML in Alberta’s environmental sector: the lack of standardized, well-documented training datasets.
ADP is partnering with Altalis and the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii) to support AI/ML validation, responsible use governance, and data integration.
Who benefits
For any organization that evaluates, procures, or builds with EO and aerial data in Alberta, ODAA removes an expensive and time-consuming step in the process: acquiring data just to find out if it works. Government ministries, municipalities, industry operators, and researchers gain access to a no-cost data environment where EO products can be assessed against authoritative provincial datasets and the legal tenure context before any procurement commitment is made. Alberta Small-to-Medium Enterprises and technology vendors can demonstrate validated, standards-aligned results to prospective buyers without asking them to fund a pilot from scratch. And for organizations that have historically lacked the budget to evaluate data independently, ODAA levels the playing field providing equitable access to the same high-quality evaluation environment available to the province’s largest operators.
Timeline
The project runs from April 2026 through March 2028, with initial stakeholder consultations getting underway this spring and summer. Refreshed datasets will be progressively published through the ODAA platform as they become available. A modernized platform and public launch are planned for Year 2.
The Open Data Areas Alberta Modernization project is funded in part by Alberta Innovates through the Environmental Innovation program. Alberta Innovates is a provincial research and innovation corporation established under the Alberta Research and Innovation Act.
After a multi-year effort by The City of Calgary, Altalis and Alberta Data Partnerships, you can now access the City’s Title and Cadastral Mapping here. By incorporating these datasets, we can better address the specific business needs of our stakeholders residing and working in the Calgary area. Thanks to all involved for their work on this.
Unfortunately we have had to cancel our stakeholder sessions for November 2022. But we will get back together in 2023.
Thanks again to all who were able to attend the November 16 Stakeholder Session. Below are links to material for review. See you in 2022!
ADP Stakeholder Session – Presentation
Alberta Data Partnerships Ltd. (ADP) and the City of Edmonton are pleased to jointly announce an agreement to have ADP maintain and distribute Cadastral and Titles Mapping for data within the Edmonton municipal boundary.
The City of Edmonton supports this change as it offers many benefits, including saving money for Edmontonians, reducing red tape for the private sector and unifying their approach to managing a crucial information asset. For ADP, this change will provide our stakeholders with seamless Cadastral and Titles Mapping for the Edmonton Municipal Region from one source.
Cadastral and Titles Mapping is a core dataset in the province for governments of all levels, the developer community, emergency response organizations, and many types of industry. By partnering with ADP, Edmonton has now joined a number of other Alberta municipalities to offer this streamlined data mapping. This strategic partnership will maintain service levels while improving efficiency for both the City and data stakeholders since they can now access this data in a single predictable way for most of Alberta. Further, this change strengthens ADP’s position as a leader in the maintenance and distribution of authoritative and accurate land information in Alberta while aligning with the City of Edmonton’s goals for efficient, effective, and innovative service delivery.
Please note that the City of Edmonton will continue to maintain assessment and holding parcel information, along with managing municipal addressing, utility information, and other base layers.
Altalis, ADP’s joint venture data distribution partner, has the data available as of November 1, 2021 at www.atalis.com. Alternatively, you could contact Leah Lilley, Altalis’ Data Centre Manager, at Leah.Lilley@Altalis.com to start the licensing process or if you have any questions.
Alberta Data Partnerships will be holding an online Stakeholder Session on November 16 to provide an update on completed and ongoing projects, as well as answer any stakeholder questions. Please use the link below to register:
The Registered Interests on Titled Land (RITL) concept is described as the visualization of interests present on a Alberta Land Title certificate which has a spatial reference including caveats, right of ways, restricted covenants and easements, discharges, surface rights and right of entry. These may be described spatially through a plan of survey, sketch plan, descriptive plan or through metes and bounds description. Essentially, it would tell you who own the facilities on a parcel of land.
This type of spatial data product has been needed and advocated for by the stakeholders at Alberta Data Partnerships (ADP) Stakeholder Sessions and External Advisory Group meetings since 2006. In 2017, ADP completed a Benchmark Project which proved the viability of the RITL mapping initiative. Following discussions with key stakeholders, including Municipal Affairs, a Discovery Report was completed in the summer of 2018 to address questions and concerns that arose, primarily around existing data sources and their applicability to the requirements that have been demonstrated by our stakeholders
The results of these reports clearly demonstrated the need for this data product and that there is no existing alternative that would meet the needs of ADP’s stakeholders for:
– Reducing duplication of data to significantly increase efficiency and drastically decrease cost for data compilation across all sectors;
– Visualization of interests on the land that does not currently exist for Titled Land and can facilitate simpler communication; and
– Broad access to a common, authoritative and accurate dataset that will improve engagement with stakeholders and partners.
Following discussions with Municipal Affairs upon the completion of the Discovery Report, a Community Grant Agreement was completed and the Pilot Project kicked off in the Spring of 2019. The Sundre area (below) was chosen for the Project and mapping RITL data took place in 2020 and early 2021. The work included:
Total Title Mapped
10,842 (count includes those parcels with and without RITL interests)
Total distinct Registered Interests that are RITL types Mapped
19,983
Total distinct Registered Interests that are CAVE or UTRW types Mapped
18,516
Stakeholders were engaged throughout the process as part of an Advisory Committee that met throughout the project timeline. In addition, customers of Altalis were invited to participate in an online survey from February 24 – March 8, 2021 to share their business needs related to a RITL mapping data product. 133 respondents provided value feedback to the project.
Lessons learned (bolded) and recommendations coming out of the report include:
Mapping each title and associated interests individually in time/cost prohibitive
Recommendation: Map interests (i.e., well-site, pipeline, etc.) rather Title-based approach
Many Interests are not mappable
Recommendation: Focus on Caveats and Utility Rights of Way in initial phase
Acquiring Titles and associated documents were very time consuming (i.e., a few documents only available via fax, no bulk downloads)
Recommendation: Work with LTO to automate
Mapping all Interests from scratch is time/cost prohibitive
Recommendation: Engage with Land Surveying community to determine how to leverage existing data
Data must be available in a timely manner for maintenance
Recommendation: Work with AER to determine a method to access data as part of the OneStop regulatory process
ADP will be funding further projects based on some of the recommendations in order to determine the viability of a provincial-wide roll out.
ADP and Alberta Economic Development & Trade announce the latest round of ODAA funding here: ODAA Project Funding
Alberta Data Partnerships (ADP) has completed the Stakeholder Session Report resulting from the participation and feedback from 160 participants in Edmonton and Calgary. While the focus of the sessions was the concept of Registered Interests on Titled Lands, presenters also touched on the history and current operations of ADP and the Open Data Areas Alberta (www.opendataareas.ca) project. We invite all interested parties to review the report and provide any questions or comments to erik@abdatapartnerships.ca.
Alberta Data Partnerships Ltd. is committed to our Vision of “Making Alberta’s spatial data more comprehensive and accessible” and part of that is to clearly state our alignment for Canada’s Open Data Principles and the Government of Alberta’s Open Information and Open Data Policy. These principles policies align with our Values and support our Strategic Priorities and allow us to better serve our stakeholders.
ADP is happy is share our Open Data Policy.
To learn more about Alberta Data Partnerships and how we can help you, contact Erik.
erik@abdatapartnerships.ca
780.996.2922
10665 Jasper Avenue, Suite 1400
Edmonton, AB
T5J 3S9