Tell Us About Yourself
I’m Bernie Connors, a Geomatics Engineer from Fredericton, New Brunswick in Atlantic Canada. I have been working in GIS since 1993 and I have worked for the Province of New Brunswick since 1997. I manage an ArcGIS Server architecture that is used to share the province’s rich GIS resources as online maps, apps and downloads. All of our services are free and open – www.snb.ca/geonb
Tell us the story behind your map (what inspired you to make it, what did you learn while making it, or any other aspects of the map or its creation you would like people to know)
I discovered that some Canadian provinces were aggregating address point data to support Next Gen 911 systems but there was no provision to also share the address data as open data. In my region, the provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island all provide address data as open data. I wanted to create a nice visualization to highlight the “open” address data in my region to help encourage other provinces to open their address data. I had never created a map with hexagon bins so I used this opportunity to learn something new.
Tell is about the Tools, data, etc., that you used to make the map
Although I use ArcGIS software at work I also keep QGIS 3.34.4 installed on my work laptop. I added the MMQGIS plugin to create a hexagon grid with an area of approximately 10 km2 per cell. I also used the QuickMapServices plugin to add the Esri Dark Gray beasemap. The address point data had to be downloaded separately from each of the 3 provinces. I trimmed each dataset to just retain the point location, the attributes were not necessary for this project. I was aiming for an aesthetic reminiscent of the old Lite-Bright toy I played with back in the 70’s.
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