The real boost, however, came from Canadian forestry officials, who used dynamic mapping to chart tree-inventory and growth cycles. Other bureaucracies began to track natural resources the same way. Before long, every department in the city was bringing us data, from environmental to wastewater. Prior to the massive data dump, each city department was its own little fiefdom of knowledge. Currently, the city's GIS database contains more than 85 layers of information, from census tracts to coastal boundaries to elevation contours to political districts to streets, sewers and water mains, to land titles to zip codes to watersheds to parks to the location of each and every fire hydrant.
Any department can access all of the data, all of the time.
For example, for zoning and permitting questions, you can call up the existing utilities and see how it affects land use. This is a real-world benefit. This capability isn't just used for data analysis and urban modeling any more. Other municipalities use similar systems, tweaked for local customs. For example, Hong Kong has feng shui information in its GIS data.