Serving up a wealth of water data
An up-close look at features of the Canada1Water platform
Aquanty’s Graham Stonebridge took the opportunity of the December 2023 C1W progress meeting to share how the project’s web team is building a portal that can meet the full range of potential user needs.
“When the portal goes live on March 31, I think people are going to be blown away.”
ALL THE DATA YOU CAN DOWNLOAD - The C1W portal will allow users to view, interact with and download a wide range of visualized data including gridded 1ºx1º datasets.
Part of the challenge in making C1W’s model outputs and datasets available to scientists, policymakers, industry heads, community leaders, academics and the wider public is that each user group has its own needs and preferences: desktop or mobile, direct downloads or GIS interoperability.
Aware of this, the project web team has been working hard over the past many months to ensure the public portal can accommodate all of those needs as flexibly as possible.
“We’re in beta testing and there’s still lots of web dev going on,” says Stonebridge, “but we’re making good progress and excited about how it’s all looking and feeling.”
Graham Stonebridge is an applications scientist at Aquanty.
Easy to use, lots to offer
The portal, which will be accessible directly from the C1W website, has an easy-to-use interface that’s device-responsive — usable on desktops, phones and tablets. A streamlined login page leads directly to a menu showing all C1W data products, with tooltips to help users interact.
“We’ve really tried to anticipate the full range of needs,” says Stonebridge, “including web mapping and web feature services that comply with open standards. These services will let people access data directly using their own GIS software. It also supports ArcMap users.
Users will be able to load and interact with individual tiled datasets at 1ºx1º resolution, and will be able to download full datasets along with all metadata and links.
“We’ve got all the static data loaded and are working toward adding the rest,” Stonebridge says. “When the portal goes live on March 31, I think people are going to be blown away. Our goal is to take data access to a whole new level.”