Capital Regional District (CRD) Natural Areas Atlas powered by Geocortex scores award

Congrats to the Victoria CRD and to the crew at Latitude Geographics as the Capital Regional District (CRD) was presented with an Award of Excellence at ESRI Canada's Regional User Conference in Victoria today. The CRD provides GIS data and services to the public via a popular application called the CRD Natural Areas Atlas (www.naturalareasatlas.ca) I went and checked out the web application and its pretty darned awesome! Powered by Geocortex, the web service provides users with 2005 color ortho imagery (and some black and white images too) along with loads of natural resource data for the area including transportation layers, soils, vegetation and more. Users can measure, mark up (redline, draw lines, polygons etc...) print, save etc.. using the application. Given the lack of freely available data up north this simple to use web service is a very nice treat and the UI is totally cool too! With much fragmentation in government in Victoria (there's more than a dozen local governments) and then the CRD which is a non-elected level of government, you can imagine how tough the budget constraints are for the CRD so its quite cool to see such an innovative GIS application come out of there.