After successfully meeting the market opportunity to license the City’s GIS data, City managers determined that there was a market need for property imagery along with an internal desire for a new generation of imagery to support cross departmental applications within the City.

The City of Calgary represents the third largest city in Canada with a population of 1,000,000 covering 722 square kilometers located in the foothills of Alberta's Rocky Mountains. City Online (www.calgary.ca/cityonline) was formed by The City of Calgary to meet the need for instant online access to property information to support real estate related transactions in this rapidly growing metropolitan area. Data sold through this site was created from assessment, planning, tax, permit, utility, and community mapping records maintained by The City of Calgary. The revenues from this site are reinvested into building and maintaining high quality GIS data for everyone’s benefit.
Many businesses are benefiting by immediate access to up-to-date residential and commercial property information for:

• Completing real estate transactions
• Assessing property value
• Confirming asset worth
• Investigating Property Tax records
• Researching development & building permit status
• Developing land or property parcels
• Creating quotes for development or contractor services
• Viewing property dimensions
• Confirming compliance with zoning regulations

In summer of 2006, the City of Calgary completed an RFP process for the latest generation imagery collection methods for a project size of 400,000 properties located along 4000 kilometers of roads throughout the 722 square kilometer City limits. GEOSPAN introduced the City to the concept of efficiently collecting close range oblique imagery.  By selecting GEOSPAN’s GEOVISTA® Imaging solutions, the City was able to begin with a library of five (5) property photos for every parcel to market on-line.  Each property contains 45° oblique perspectives from all four cardinal directions along with a traditional nadir view.  The straight down views offer a much higher amount of resolution detail than was available from previous ortho-photography collection missions.  Offering the cropped images displaying an area covering within 10 meters of the parcel boundaries made the photos much more useful to our clients.  GEOSPAN generated cropped property imagery along with the neighborhood tiles displaying each property.

GEOSPAN’s automated process crops out property photos based on extending 10 meters beyond the parcel boundary.  A symbol representing the parcel centroid location is projected into the nadir image.

The project RFP includes the option to take advantage of GEOSPAN’s unique ability to collect street-level imagery and property photos using vehicles that collect imagery at posted driving speeds.  Our goal is to justify offering street-level property photos to supplement the oblique aerial photos based on the incremental value of offering the two perspectives.  GEOSPAN is able to provide integrated aerial oblique and street-level systems. 

The internal use of the imagery by the City will be primarily with the GEOVISTA Application Program Interface (API).  This API offers an Active X control to support bi-directional integration with the ESRI ArcGIS software used throughout the City.  This approach offers integration with other GIS data along with no additional application software to purchase and support.