BGIS Capstone

Alberta Public Land Footprint Relation Web App

Problem

Activity of public land in Alberta requires a disposition, more often than not the land flagged for disposition and use by this activity does not match the real world. Sometimes the real world forces these changes, other times mistakes lead to the discrepancy. At present there is not a simple method to capture and examine these changes

Project Stake Holders

MNC Ltd: project coordinator
SAIT students (Keith Johnson, Madison Pavelich, Weiwei Fan, Chris Mitchell)
MNC Ltd: senior advisors
Industry professionals
Alberta government
General public
GEOS 459 SAIT Instructors

Puropose and Scope

The Web Map Application to be created will provide users the ability to sketch a polygon that reflects the as-built footprint and relates it to the DIDS [Digital Integrated Dispositions] application. It will accomplish this through off the shelf software solutions that do not require a fully custom built application.

Geospatial Technology

Experience Builder

The ArcGIS Experience Web App Builder allows for rapid development and a common interface that will make it more accessible to a variety of users. It also benefits from a central distribution space.

Optical Remote Sensing

Esri's World imagery layer has resolutions up to 0.5m/pixel within 5m of on the ground accuracy. Its temporal resolution is between 2012 and 2023

Basic Use

At its simplest the application allows the user to select the polygon of an existing disposition and using that entry create a new sketch layer. The user is then able to use the ESRI world imagery layer to digitize the current land disposition and save it to the database through the footprint console. The users are then able to use these sketch layers to perform statistical reports and visuals highlighting the differences seen between the imagery and what was assigned as a dispoition.

Footprint Console

The footprint console is a separate app the allows us to run custom tools and is in many ways the heart of the application. It is used to maintain data integrity within the sketch layers. It allows the user to maintain multiple sets of polygons for a disposition while maintaining one as the "current" or "definitive" version used in comparison analysis.

Dispositions themselves may be composed of multiple polygons with the same identifier number, this console allows the user to create a matching polygon structure to allow comparisons.

The figure below shows an example of disposition DLO830530. For this disposition we have created three versions for analysis. The light blow arrow highlights the version order they were created in, while the dark blue inidicates which is current and which are archived. In this example, version 2 is the current footprint that would be used for analysis.

Application Workflow

Recorded Tool Demos

Creating a New Footprint for Comparison

Editing A Footprint in the Investigator

Set a Footprint to be Current for use in Visualization and Reporting

Erasing a Footprint

Statistical Reporting on Discrepancies

Video Tour of the Application (no sound currently)

Potential Next Steps

The created web app demonstrated that easy to create off the shelf components could be used to build a web app to allow a user to highlight changes between dispositions in the government system vs its real world on the ground occurrence. However there are several places that this could be improved and potentially automated.

AI and Machine Learning: This could be used to classifty the ground use and the automatically assign it to the disposition polygon it most closely matches.
Satellite data fusion/pan sharpening: Esri World imagery has excellent resolution, but in some cases poor temporal resolution. Other data sources have much better temporal resolutions, such as Landsat and Sentinel, but relatively low spatial resolution. Pan sharpening and fusion techniques might give us the best of both worlds
Amendment Layer Capabilities: Allowing a new updated polygon to be download an submitted to the DIDS to allow disposition holders to amend their holding to bring it in line with the real world.

App Components and Flowcharts

The footprint management console required several custom pieces of python code to be functional, the flowcharts below highlight the logic that was used for these.

Project Citations

[1] MNC Ltd. Alberta Public Land Footprint GIS Web Application MNC_SAIT BGIS Capstone Project. 7 Jan. 2023.

[2] Maxar. (n.d.). 1300-Class Platform | Commercial Spacecraft Platform. MAXAR. Retrieved March 15, 2023, from https://www.maxar.com/products/1300-class-platform.

[3] Mehmet, Alkan, et al. “Updating Objects for Topographic Map Information Using High Resolution Satellite Images of Zonguldak Testfield.” Remote Sensing for Science, Education & Natural & Cultural Heritage, 2010, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267550152_Updating_Objects_for_Topographic_Map_Information_Using_High_Resolution_Satellite_Images_of_Zonguldak_Testfield.

[4] Government of Alberta. Public Lands Formal Disposition Application Process (April 19, 2018). 19 Apr. 2018, https://open.alberta.ca/dataset/public-lands-formal-disposition-application-process.

[5] WOWA. Property Survey in Canada - All You Need to Know | WOWA.Ca. 2 Dec. 2022, https://wowa.ca/property-survey.