It is one of the premiere examples of a successful multi-participant geospatial information systems project. All of these agencies create and use automated mapping and spatial database technologies and share data of common interest. GBIS is based on a very accurate map of property boundaries - the cadastral base.
Participants can also create their own service areas, such as neighborhoods and wards.
The result is that most of the City's information can be viewed as maps. The versatility of GBIS is evident in many applications. Fire, ambulance and police services are integrating their call taking, dispatching and records management operations to reduce response times to calls and decide where best to place their resources. GBIS is used to plan route locations for utilities, meter reading, garbage collection and transit. Planners use GBIS to integrate addresses, census, socio-economic and land use data for both short and long term planning processes.