The Town of View Royal, on Vancouver Island, is the first municipality in BC to adopt the AddressBC data model as a core piece of their new GIS implementation. This shows tremendous support for AddressBC, ICIS's geospatial point-based address system currently in the final development phase.

Emmet McCusker, Director of Engineering Services for View Royal, explains their leading edge in adopting AddressBC: "We didn't want to reinvent the wheel and the timing was right for us to adopt a best practices approach to maintaining our address information."  

Address data for View Royal was initially built by converting CAD drawing address annotation to create address points. These address points were used to seed the AddressBC system as part of the initial development. Checking the address data was completed by the Engineering and Planning Departments with a final field verification to be undertaken by the View Royal Fire Department.

 

Steven Garner, lead consultant for the GIS project, notes that, "We have learned a lot and continue to learn the nuances that go along with using the AddressBC model." View Royal's early experience implementing AddressBC will serve as a valuable guide for other Local Governments.

 

In addition, View Royal has also adopted the ICF standard from ICIS for their base cadastral data. This will ensure that both addressing and cadastral data will be in the best format for sharing with their fellow ICIS members.

AddressBC is an ICIS initiative to create a common point address database for British Columbia. To find out more about ICIS, its membership, vision and other key initiatives, please check out the ICIS website.