The City of White Rock is the 147th organization to adopt ParcelMap BC, driven by the need for improved data accuracy and efficiency.
Ying Lin, GIS Analyst, Information Technology explained, “ParcelMap BC offers detailed information about land boundaries, ownership, and legal descriptions, all backed by authoritative sources. This reliability is crucial for making informed decisions related to land use, transactions, planning, and development.”
Given that the city’s parcel polygons were manually digitized about two decades ago, continuing to manually update the geometry in-house to reflect changes and development became increasingly difficult. With geometry now sourced from ParcelMap BC and attributes from TEMPEST, city staff can focus on other priorities. In addition, they can explore incorporating features, such as ParcelMap BC attributes, in the future.
Transitioning to any new process comes with some challenges and finding creative solutions. The city’s web applications are highly customized, drawing land and legal data from both GIS and TEMPEST. To minimize disrupting the connection between these systems, an automated procedure was developed that applied ParcelMap BC geometry to the existing parcel layer while maintaining all existing attributes and the link to the TEMPEST system. Running weekly, the script detects changes in geometry and applies them to the parcel layer.
Another issue involved feature-linked annotation layers. Whenever the parcel geometry was updated, the feature-linked annotations would reset to their default settings, causing the loss of customizations. Manually finding and correcting each one was very time-consuming. Fortunately, an option in the Annotation Layer Properties can be unchecked to prevent annotation updates based on geometry changes.
When asked what surprised her the most after having adopted ParcelMap BC, Ying Lin said “the impressive high level of accuracy and frequency of updates which ensures that the data remains current and reliable”.
To learn more about ParcelMap BC adoption resources and tools, visit ltsa.ca.