In conjunction with its 75th anniversary, the Royal Canad-ian Geographical Society, along with Canadian Geo-graphic magazine, brought its new, large format, 192-page Canadian atlas to life on the Internet, creating a multimedia experience of the Canadian landscape.Available free online since April on Canadian Geo-graphic’s Web site, the project uses interactive technologies to enable colourful presentations of Canada’s geography, culture and people.
“We produced this (print) book and realized the enormous potential for an online version of the material,” said Maureen Murphy, vice-president, consumer marketing and operations at Canadian Geographic.
The goal, she said, was “to provide a more interactive experience, be able to have flash animations and slide-shows and many more photographs and also to allow the user to interact with the map rather than just looking at it in two dimensions on a printed page.”
The initiative, which took nine months to complete, used the resources of Gatineau-based Web mapping application developer DBx Geomatics and Ottawa-based Banfield Seguin Ltd., a marketing communications company.
“We’re experts in developing mapping on the Web using interactive tools,” said Dany Bouchard, president of DBx Geomatics. “Using geographic information systems, we worked with Natural Re-sources Canada data and amalgamated all of that into a single repository and worked from there to build an interactive atlas,” he said.
Accuracy needed
Since DBx Geomatics’ in-volvement was on the cartographic side, making sure the maps were accurately represented and followed Canadian Geographic standards was paramount, said Bouchard.
“On the Microsoft .NET platform, we used MapInfo Corp. technologies for the mapping and the atlas functionalities are based on the MapXtreme 2004 web mapping engine,” he explained.
In consultation with DBx Geomatics, Banfield Seguin Ltd. developed the user interface design using Macromedia Flash.
“Banfield Seguin built the thematic section, games, quizzes and search function,” according to Canadian Geographic new media manager, Gilles Gagnier.
“Our cartographer worked very closely with them to get the maps to be as close as possible to the styles and quality that people expect from Canadian geographic maps,” he said.
The $1.2 million cost of bringing the atlas online was shared equally by Canadian Culture online, a grant program offered by the department of Canadian Heritage, and TD Bank.
Microsoft Canada also donated programs and some technology.
Among the challenges faced was the short time frame and rethinking the entire concept of the atlas in Web form.
“We could have used the print maps and had people view them in PDF but we wanted to take advantage of the medium we were using —that’s why we looked at DBx and what they could do with intelligent zoom layering to get the viewer to be able to zoom into the maps, pan and measure,” explained Murphy.
Traffic doubled
Gagnier said it’s difficult to measure the return on investment of the six-month old project.
“Our traffic both in terms of visitors and page views has held steady at double since we launched,” he said.
“Our goal is to make it an everlasting project that we’re constantly upgrading, adding new material to, and keeping it alive and active for the consumer as well as the educators and students who are making great use of it in the classroom,” said Murphy.
