HeavyMap is our industrial atlas: a mapping and intelligence tool for heavy industry and for general economic development. It aims to show the physical industrial economy of the region as it actually is: where things are made, stored and moved, and how land, rail, road and port fit together.
Where we are: the application is in design. The data groundwork has been laid; the map itself is still to be built. HeavyMap is the new name for what we called the Industrial Atlas.
The question it answers is “what does the industrial economy here really look like?”, not “where are the businesses?”. That means land, buildings, rail, roads and ports as much as company names, and it means seeing them together across the whole region, over boundaries that usually divide the data.
| Theme | Examples |
|---|---|
| Land and zoning | Industrial and employment lands, zoning. |
| Buildings and sites | Building footprints, parcels, addresses. |
| Movement | Rail, truck routes, ports. |
| Business | Business inventories where a jurisdiction publishes one. |
| Sites in transition | Disused land and brownfield sites. |
The groundwork draws on open data: OpenStreetMap, the City of Hamilton, the Niagara Region, New York State and the U.S. Census Bureau.
An atlas is only useful if you can trust it. These rules come first.
| Principle | What it means |
|---|---|
| Provenance | Every feature carries its source, retrieval date, licence and original ID. |
| Gaps stay gaps | Missing data is shown as missing. Nothing is invented to fill a map. |
| Observation vs. inference | A railway from a government file and something inferred are never drawn as the same kind of claim. |
| Freshness | Every layer says how current it is. |
| Scores are indicators | Derived scores are labelled as analytical aids, not economic truth. |
| Reports what records say | It does not conclude that a site is vacant or that a named business or owner is failing. |
Different places publish different data. The Niagara Region publishes a business inventory; Hamilton does not. HeavyMap will show that difference rather than smooth it over, so no one concludes a place has less industry only because it publishes less.
We would like to hear from people with GIS, data, mapping and design skills, and from anyone with local knowledge of industrial land and buildings.
All tools: Board · HeavyMap · Environments · Gage.
Questions, or want to help build? Write to office@niagaraassembly.com.