Those of you who are astute readers of this blog (and other geo-spatial blogs) will probably already know that the small town of Nanaimo in British Columbia, Canada has been garnering the reputation of the best town to leverage Google Earth. Even Google has helped with this reputation when Google Earth Chief Technologist Michael Jones last year mentioned Nanaimo in a couple keynote presentations.
Nanaimo has set out to make the most out of GIS and mapping technologies. And, they’ve chosen Google Earth and Maps for many of their public-facing applications. One of the chief architects of the effort in Nanaimo is a GIS professional named Jason Birch who is a regular GEB reader, and has his own techie blog called Random Nodes. Nanaimo has some of the highest resolution imagery of any town inside GE. He recently appeared on national TV about the project. Now Nanaimo has received even bigger exposure through an article in Time Magazine called “How Google Earth Ate Our Town“. Which talks all about the project.
Nanaimo has some amazing content available for GE which includes maps, information on city parks, 3D visualization of the buildings, parcel information, and complete business listings. Recently Nanaimo announced (PDF) they have a new tool allowing citizens (and the world) to track real-time fire department incident reports on Google Maps (or you can save it to your My Maps and view it in Google Earth as well).
Visit the City of Nanaimo web site to find out even more about this very geo-progressive town. There are more maps and GIS information available there. All the news about these data and tools, combined with the beautiful summer-time aerial photography of Nanaimo, is sure to improve the tourism and possibly even increase the population of this very pretty town.
About Frank Taylor
Frank Taylor started the Google Earth Blog in July, 2005 shortly after Google Earth was first released. He has worked with 3D computer graphics and VR for many years and was very impressed with this exciting product. Frank completed a 5.5 year circumnavigation of the earth by sailboat in June 2015 which you can read about at Tahina Expedition, and is a licensed pilot, backpacker, diver, and photographer.