The Town-Know-It-All application is part of the Virtual Charlottetown project, sponsored by Industry Canada’s Smart Communities – a program that aims to make Canada the most connected nation in the world. The three municipalities that comprise the Greater Charlottetown area, and several other key institutions, designed Virtual Charlottetown to establish community centrality. They accomplished this by creating a community portal for the Greater Charlottetown area, which brings together marketplace and community information. Within this community portal, Baseline Business Geographics Inc. developed an on-line mapping application that allows residents and visitors alike to identify key areas in the area and discover meaningful information about them.

Background

CADC, along with the City of Charlottetown, Town of Stratford and Town of Cornwall, wanted to promote the concept of Smart Communities to their community, and they needed a method of facilitating its implementation. The idea behind the project was to create a more knowledgeable future for their communities by incorporating Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) into the daily lives of citizens and organizations. One of the goals of the Virtual Charlottetown project was to create new and innovative ways to empower residents, institutions and regions as a whole.

Problem

The sponsoring organizations of this project wanted a method of linking people and organizations together while addressing local development needs. Economic development was on top of the city’s list of priorities, as well as improving the quality of life within its communities. Although ICT has been implemented in various developments within the community, the City realized that its citizens did not fully realize the benefits that it had to offer. If the citizens did not have the tools to provide themselves with proper information about their community, local businesses and organizations could not operate at their full potential.

Solution

Baseline Business Geographics Inc. developed an application that brought together elements of ICT and mapping, and provided citizens with an easy-to-use application that could be integrated with their daily lives, accessible 24-hours a day. The purpose of the Town-Know-It-All application is to provide residents in the Charlottetown area with any information that is related to where they live and the city as a whole.

Essentially, any physical point within the Charlottetown area can be mapped, and the user can locate this point by performing a search in relation to where the user himself is located. A large part of the appeal of this application is the fact that people have been using maps to find their way around for thousands of years. The data within the application, however, is kept current as information within the community changes.

The Town-Know-It-All provides a wealth of information and a variety of tools to use for navigating around the geographic interface. Although the data that can be inputted is limitless, the data used in Virtual Charlottetown’s Town-Know-It-All application includes layers of detailed information on the following topics:

Additionally, Town-Know-It-All can display Points of Interest on the map, represented by a legend of characters that denote a facility’s location. A list of points of interest included in Virtual Charlottetown’s Town-Know-It-All application includes:

The layer control feature of the application allows the user to view as many or as few of these different data types as he desires. It also allows him to view air photos of properties using digital ortho-imagery.

Town-Know-It-All can retrieve information based on a civic address search, a search based on the name or type of a facility or by simply clicking a point on the map with a mouse. The application is beneficial for everyone – whether the user is a resident, a traveler or a business. It allows residents to find information about businesses or services in the community quickly and easily, while it provides local businesses with an opportunity to market their company to a large, targeted audience. Also, the Town-Know-It-All application benefits the tourism industry because it is a robust information tool for travelers to use themselves or for Visitors Information Center employees to provide the visitors with information.

Also, a user can measure the distance between various points he marks on the map, or the area of a combination of points. For example, parents can plan a safe walking route to and from their child’s school, a jogger can measure the distance of the route that he runs or a delivery truck can identify where road construction is and find the best route around it. Now everyone in the community can use Town-Know-It-All to simplify their daily routines, and fully realize the benefits of integrating mapping into their community and their lives.

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Town-Know-It-All

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Case Study

Customer: Virtual Charlottetown in cooperation with Industry Canada’s Smart Communities Needs A timely and effective information system for residents, businesses and visitors. Integrate mapping with other data. Easily display, maintain and update information. Problem Lack of a method to link the community and local organizations together Need to develop local economy Solutions Provide the community with an easy-to-use location-based system implemented cost-effectively on the Web. Quick and easy access to data from multiple sources. Fast, easy access to business-critical information and the ability to see data geographically by site. Benefits Residents, businesses and visitors have a powerful tool they can use themselves. Immediately view the locations of points of interest and detailed data pertaining to them. Town-Know-It-All can help exploit the city’s opportunities by having a single easy-to-use source of information for individuals and organizations who contribute to the health of the regional economy People of all skill levels and types can easily access information