Optimus Template

The backbone of the INDEA is an extensive network of road segments, each of which is associated, whenever possible, with address ranges and municipalities. In addition, a complete and consistent set of Electoral District (ED) and Voter Area (VA) boundaries is also maintained in the INDEA. The INDEA maintains each boundary set of ED/VA data in a coverage. (A coverage is a partition of a region into non-overlapping sub-regions such that every point in the region is either inside one of the sub-regions, or on the boundary of one or more sub-regions. Thus, the region is completely covered by the sub-regions.)

Each road segment can contain values for a wide variety of attributes, such as name, aliases, address ranges and number of lanes. Of these, the most important for EBC's purposes are the name and address range, since these allow geocoding of the addresses in their Voter Register. The aim of the type of geocoding required by EBC is for the INDEA to provide the correct ED and VA corresponding to any address in the Province. Considerable effort has been devoted to making the assignment of address ranges as complete as possible.

Many other types of data, each of which can have various attributes, are also included in the INDEA. Some examples are:

• point features including address points, point VAs and mountain peaks
• line features including coastlines, rivers, streams, railways and transmission lines
• areal features including lakes, islands, parks, schools, colleges, universities, hospitals, airports and Indian reserves

These features provide a wealth of background data for the INDEA basemap, and for supporting specific EBC applications such as VA boundary delineation.

The INDEA has been implemented in the form of a geospatial database, using the IBM Informix Dynamic Server with Universal Data Option. This environment was chosen in preference to a conventional GIS platform, and has the following advantages:

• the seamless treatment and tight integration of the spatial and attribute data
• the ability to incorporate user-defined data types, and features such as inheritance and versioning
• the ability to implement user-defined functions
• support for complex queries
• the availability of an existing BCS DataBlade (TerrainWorks) implementing the functionality to support such functions and queries

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