Manitoba Government Honoured for GIS Excellence by Esri

Esri Canada today recognized Manitoba Government’s Community and Regional Planning Branch with an Award of Excellence in applying geographic information system (GIS) technology to improve assessment parcel data management in the province. To complete an assessment parcel data fabric for incorporated Manitoba outside of the City of Winnipeg, the Branch partnered with local municipalities. The Branch now supports property assessment through the maintenance of rural Manitoba’s assessment parcel data.

“In just a few short years, the Community and Regional Planning branch has significantly modernized assessment parcel mapping in Manitoba,” said Alex Miller, president, Esri Canada. “This results in increased data accuracy and quality, and provides a sustainable and affordable system for maintaining the Province’s assessment parcel fabric. By taking concrete steps to halt and reverse the gradual degradation of the provincial assessment parcel data, the Manitoba Government has addressed a challenge that many jurisdictions currently struggle with.”

Previously, the Province was losing original parcel dimensions whenever assessment parcels were modified or added to Manitoba’s assessment parcel fabric. This made it difficult to effectively manage or improve the accuracy of the parcels in an organized manner. To address this challenge, the Community and Regional Planning Branch implemented a new assessment parcel data management system.

After reviewing several solutions, the branch chose Esri’s Parcel Editor, an application in ArcGIS Desktop for effectively organizing, editing and updating parcel data. The Branch also employed Esri’s Parcel Fabric model, which supports the inclusion of modern cadastral information preserving recorded bearings and distances from survey plans. Each parcel contains its own attributes but is also interconnected and interrelated to all the surrounding parcels, forming a continuous parcel network or “fabric.” Since the fabric retains the original recorded dimensions, viewers can use ground control collected after the parcels are drawn to improve the positional accuracy of the parcel data without having to redraw it, increasing accuracy and providing significant time and cost savings.

“This new assessment parcel data management system has made our mapping processes much more efficient,” said Greg Kaletzke, planner – GIS specialist, Manitoba Government’s Community and Regional Planning Branch. “It has also enhanced our internal capacity to maintain Manitoba’s assessment parcel fabric into the future. Using Parcel Editor has allowed our staff to be innovative with numbered lots that enable custom sequencing, multi-feature adjustment for zoning and other layers and integrated topology, which is the basis for all construction within the fabric.”

With Parcel Editor in ArcGIS Desktop, staff members can now create quick annotations directly from attributes and access historic records containing previous assessment parcel dimensions, as well as leverage tabular controls that allow interaction with multiple parcels without relying on selections or queries. They now have an essentially complete fabric of assessment parcels in Manitoba. As new property is registered and new survey control information obtained, they can keep the assessment fabric up to date and improve its accuracy using ArcGIS parcel editing tools.

Learn more about Esri Canada’s parcel mapping approach.