Tech Tuesday Webinar "The City of Ottawa’s journey into GIS and Digital Twins" December 9, 2025 скачать в хорошем качестве

Tech Tuesday Webinar "The City of Ottawa’s journey into GIS and Digital Twins" December 9, 2025

This webinar is geared towards both executives and municipal managers across Canada, and engineers and technical staff interested in seeing what the future can hold for their jurisdiction and clients. The City of Ottawa is developing a 3D virtual replica of the city known as the Ottawa Digital Twin (OTwin). This project is intended to be a powerful tool for urban planning, infrastructure management, and public engagement. The OTwin Viewer provides city staff with an immersive 3D environment for advanced tools like scenario modeling, sightline analysis, and sun/shadow analysis. It helps planners visualize the impact of new projects and test zoning provisions in 3D. The city uses technologies such as LiDAR, drones, and 360-degree imagery to create a high-fidelity digital replica of the urban environment and can be used to evaluate tree cover, flood plains and 15-minute neighbourhoods, as well as integrating IoT feeds for real-time visualization. A mobile mapping project is creating a detailed digital inventory of traffic assets, such as signs, signals, and crosswalks. This data feeds into the digital twin to help city staff plan and maintain traffic infrastructure more efficiently. We explored both the management decision behind the City of Ottawa getting into digital twins and value that is being derived, followed by a deep dive into the technology built and work underway, including the City’s GATSMobile that is used to collect high-definition data across the City. This Tech Tuesday webinar was organized and hosted by ITS Canada's Tech Hub. Moderator was Omar Choudhry, P.Eng., Senior Specialist – Intelligent Transportation Systems, City of Ottawa – Traffic Services. Presenters were: Randal Rodger - Program Manager, Geospatial Analytics Technology & Solutions. Randal is a technology leader at the City of Ottawa, driving enterprise-scale innovation and digital twin strategy. He leads Ottawa’s Digital Twin program and spearheaded the transformation of the city’s aerial imagery and vector mapping operations into a reality-capture ecosystem integrating LiDAR, drones, terrestrial scanning, and mobile mapping. These capabilities underpin Ottawa’s smart city initiatives, providing actionable insights that enable more informed decisions across planning, infrastructure, and operations. His work reflects two core principles: making innovation practical and accessible, and strengthening enterprise foundations as new technologies reshape city operations. Jean-François Dionne - Program Coordinator, Geographic Info Services. Jean-François Dionne is an award-winning Geospatial Strategist and Digital Twin pioneer with over 25 years of experience driving the global evolution of spatial technologies. He currently spearheads the City of Ottawa's OTwin Digital Twin Initiative—a ground-breaking 3D urban scape that earned him the ESRI Inc. 2023 Special Achievement in GIS Award. A proven leader in the field, Jean-François bridges strategic development with deep technical mastery. He translates technologies like high-resolution LiDAR, reality capture, and GIS/BIM integration into transformative urban planning and engineering solutions. His municipal work includes pioneering an award-winning Reality Capture Program and deploying enterprise-level terrestrial and mobile LiDAR systems. With over 15 years of operational expertise, he is an authority in Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS/RPAS). His background spans operations management, technical sales (achieving Best Sales for senseFly SA worldwide), regulatory compliance, and leading multi-team technical surveys utilizing advanced GNSS, LiDAR, and multibeam systems for mining, construction, and environmental clients. His influence spans decades of Geomatics leadership, having managed large-scale geospatial services and guided technical direction for major environmental and engineering firms. Dr. Michael Martin – Geospatial Strategist. Dr. Michael Martin is a spatial data scientist specializing in 3D and AI. Over the last decade Michael has worked on several challenges in GIScience, from founding a non-profit addressing the GIS digital-divide, to publishing research in on reality capture, to co-founding companies focused on spatial innovation. Recently, Michael has focused on the frontiers of digital twin technologies, developing Ottawa's OTwin—a meeting place for the city's spatial datasets in a 4D environment—and focused on digital twins and AI. Across all the projects Michael has worked on are two core values: 1) enabling non-experts to access cutting-edge innovation, and 2) thinking critically about the positionality of technology.