Sylvan Lake
Popular lakeside community — comprehensive self-hosted ArcGIS with development, property, and land use data.
Population ~16,000
Data Sources & Methodology
Primary source — Town of Sylvan Lake ArcGIS
Available data — zoning, dev permits, construction
Provincial overlay — Alberta Regional Dashboard (regionaldashboard.alberta.ca) provides 54 socioeconomic indicators for all ~340 Alberta municipalities. Updated daily, cached 24 hours.
How data is collected — Municipal ArcGIS/Socrata endpoints are queried directly via REST APIs. Each municipality uses different field names for the same concepts (e.g. assessed value might be called TASS, assessed_value, ASSESSED_VALUE, or Total_Assessed_Value). We normalize these into a consistent schema. Regional dashboard data is fetched from the Government of Alberta's open data API and falls back to PostgreSQL snapshots during upstream outages.
What's not available — Business licences (only Edmonton & Calgary publish these via API). Vacant lot tracking (only Stony Plain has a dedicated layer). These data gaps exist because each municipality decides independently what to publish via their GIS systems.