In 2000 forest ministers of Canada’s federal, provincial and territorial governments 
initiated the development of Canada’s National Forest Information System (NFIS 
Canada) to respond to national and international reporting commitments on 
sustainable forest management.  

The development and application of open source software has allowed NFIS Canada to 
deploy a Canada wide web-based Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) compliant 
distributed interoperable infrastructure at a very modest cost.  The adoption of 
open source solutions as one of its business models was driven by the requirement 
that NFIS Canada (1) be based on international standards, (2) be vendor neutral, (3) 
minimize licensing costs, (4) minimize impact on partner business practices and (5) 
support common services delivered over a common interoperable distributed 
infrastructure.  In support of its open source business model NFIS Canada has been a 
participant in the development of the OGC compliant version of University of 
Minnesota (UMN) MapServer and Chameleon.  NFIS is cooperating with Canada’s National 
Land and Water Information Service (NLWIS) in the specifications and development of 
Geolinked Data Access Service (GDAS) and a web based generalized statistical summary 
reporting system (GSSRS).  NFIS has led the development of the data domain service 
(DDS), the distributed spatial analysis architecture (DSAA), the distributed access 
control system (DACS) and is currently working on a number of services that will be 
open sourced.  In addition NFIS Canada is using PostGIS, Postgress, Ka-Map, WikiCalc 
and other open source products and it is distributing an open source OGC 
compliant  “SDI-in-a-Box” based on MapServer and Chameleon. 

NFIS currently supports an infrastructure serving 14 jurisdictions and comprised of 
20 nodes located in 16 cities located across Canada with 2 enterprise level 
computing arrays, 2 help centres and 5 development teams. The continued expansion of 
the infrastructure will be primarily based on open source solutions.