Government & Public Sector

Consistent geographic data across every department.

Municipal, provincial, and federal agencies deal with fragmented geographic data every day — different boundary definitions, inconsistent address formats, no single source of truth for neighbourhood-level context. Neighbourly provides a clean, authoritative, Canadian-hosted API that can serve as a shared location layer across programs, portals, and internal systems.

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Neighbourly · Government
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PublicSector data
The challenge

Public-sector teams need consistent, authoritative location data across departments — but boundaries, demographics and permits live in incompatible silos, and every new tool re-integrates them from scratch instead of drawing from a shared fabric.

Planning, Service Delivery & Community Reporting

One authoritative location layer for every program and portal.

Geographic data fragmentation is one of the most persistent operational challenges in the public sector. A planning department works with one boundary dataset. A service delivery program uses another. A community health initiative references a third. None of them agree on neighbourhood names. None of them share an address identifier. And every inter-departmental data sharing initiative runs into the same reconciliation problem.

Neighbourly is designed to function as a shared location infrastructure layer — a single, consistent API that resolves any Canadian civic address to authoritative boundary identifiers, neighbourhood context, and demographic data, regardless of which system or program is querying it. One source of truth for address, geography, and place — queryable by any system that can make an HTTP request.

The platform is Canadian-hosted, uses Statistics Canada and municipal open data sources, and returns data in standard GeoJSON and JSON formats with no proprietary lock-in. It's designed to be the location layer that works across procurement boundaries and departmental silos.

Planning & zoning Service delivery mapping Community reporting Infrastructure analysis Housing supply tracking
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Relevant data layers
  • Full Boundary Hierarchy — Country, province, census division, upper/lower-tier municipality — consistent shapes and IDs across all levels of government.
  • Demographics — Statistics Canada census data, normalized and queryable at the neighbourhood and municipal level for community planning and equity analysis.
  • Address Standardization — Clean civic addresses for service delivery matching, permit intake, and inter-departmental data linking.
  • Building Permits — Permit records normalized across municipal formats — useful for planning departments and housing supply tracking.
  • Environmental Data — Crown land, water, wildlife management units, trails and campgrounds as GeoJSON, with flood zone and wildfire risk overlays for stewardship, parks and planning work.
  • Points of Interest & Trails — Public infrastructure, parks, Crown land, and waterway data for environmental and recreation planning.
Capabilities

What Neighbourly gives government teams.

The specific, production-grade capabilities behind government on Neighbourly — not features on a slide, but data and tooling you can ship on.

A headless data fabric to build on

Neighbourly is a headless API — a data fabric that unifies boundaries, demographics, permits, addresses and environmental layers behind one key and one schema, with no bundled interface. Departments and their vendors build citizen portals, planning tools and reporting systems directly on the same endpoints, instead of re-integrating fragmented sources for every new application.

Authoritative boundary hierarchy

Access a consistent Country to Province to Municipality to Neighbourhood hierarchy with MultiPolygon boundaries, bounding boxes and centroids at every level. Departments can align service areas to the same geography rather than reconciling incompatible internal shapefiles.

Census-derived demographic reporting

Pull census-derived demographics — age, income, tenure, education and employment — by Forward Sortation Area and municipality for planning and public reporting. The same fields are available across the country for equitable cross-jurisdiction comparison.

Normalized development activity

Query normalized Building Permits data across supported cities to analyze growth and development trends without cleaning each municipality's raw feed. Normalization is what makes multi-city comparison possible.

Public land and water context

The Environmental layer delivers crown land, water, wildlife management units, trails and campgrounds as GeoJSON for stewardship, parks and planning work. Geometry integrates directly into GIS workflows.

Coordinate-to-boundary lookups

Resolve any coordinate or address to the boundaries and hierarchy it falls within, so service records can be tagged with consistent geography at intake. This underpins accurate service-area reporting.

Cross-department single source

Because every layer shares one schema and key, planning, permitting and reporting teams draw from the same reference data. This removes the silos that cause departments to publish conflicting figures.

What you can build

How government teams use Neighbourly.

A headless layer to build on

One API with no bundled UI — build citizen portals, planning tools and reporting systems directly on the same endpoints.

Boundary & hierarchy data

A consistent Country → Province → Municipality → Neighbourhood hierarchy for every service area.

Demographic reporting

Census-derived profiles by FSA and municipality for planning and reporting.

Permit & development activity

Normalized building-permit data for growth and planning insight.

Benefits

Why government teams choose Neighbourly.

Build once, on a shared fabric

A headless API with no bundled UI lets every department and vendor build applications on the same data fabric, rather than re-integrating siloed sources for each new tool — all backed by 99.9% uptime.

One consistent geographic truth

Departments align to a single boundary hierarchy and demographic base, ending the reconciliation of conflicting internal datasets.

Report with confidence

Census-derived, standardized demographics give public reporting a defensible and comparable foundation across jurisdictions.

Canadian residency and compliance

Data hosted in Canadian data centres and PIPEDA compliance meet the public sector's residency and privacy expectations directly.

GIS-ready delivery

Boundaries and environmental features arrive as standard geometry, so they drop into existing GIS and planning tools without conversion.

How we help

Three ways to put Neighbourly to work for government.

Use the data yourself, have us build the whole thing, or bring in our team for strategy and analysis — whatever fits how you work.

Build on the Neighbourly API

Wire standardized government data straight into your product or workflow — REST and GraphQL, one key, Canada-wide.

Explore the API →

A custom solution, built for you

No engineering team? We design and build the government tool, dashboard or platform on our data — you bring the idea, we ship it.

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Data services & advisory

Strategy, enrichment, analytics and measurement from our team, so your government data turns into decisions and results.

See our services →

Canadian data residency

Hosted in Canadian data centres, end to end.

PIPEDA-compliant

Privacy-first by default, with provincial compliance built in.

One consistent schema

Every layer shares a spine, so data joins cleanly.

Always current

Live, maintained data — never stale snapshots.

Frequently asked questions

Common questions about this data and how to use it.

How do government agencies use Neighbourly?

As a shared location layer for planning, service delivery, community reporting, and infrastructure analysis.

Is the data Canadian-hosted?

Yes — Canadian data and Canadian hosting, suitable for public-sector data-residency requirements. All data is hosted in Canadian data centres and PIPEDA-compliant by default, with provincial privacy compliance built into the architecture.

How is it accessed?

Through a single API queryable by coordinate, address or boundary, with consistent JSON responses, so it can plug into existing GIS, reporting, and portal systems.

Can it support open-data and resident-facing tools?

Yes. The boundary and neighbourhood layers suit resident portals and public dashboards.

What boundary data is available for government use?

A full geopolitical hierarchy with MultiPolygon boundaries, bounding boxes and centroids at every level, from country down to neighbourhood.

What demographic data can the public sector use?

Census-derived demographics by Forward Sortation Area and municipality — age, income, tenure, education and employment — for planning and reporting.

Does it include building permit and development data?

Yes. Normalized building-permit data across 20 cities supports growth, planning and development-activity analysis.

Can I access environmental and public-land data?

Yes — a Canada-specific layer covering crown land, water, wildlife management units, trails and campgrounds, delivered as GeoJSON, with flood zone and wildfire risk overlays also available.

Can we build our own applications on top of Neighbourly?

Yes. Neighbourly is a headless API — a data fabric with no bundled interface — so your teams and vendors can build citizen-facing portals, planning tools, GIS integrations and reporting systems directly on the same endpoints, and present the results however each application requires.

Is the platform reliable enough for public services?

Yes. The API is backed by 99.9% uptime, Canadian data residency and PIPEDA compliance, so it can sit under mission-critical government applications and reporting.

In what formats is boundary and environmental geometry delivered?

Boundaries are provided as MultiPolygon with bounding boxes and centroids, and the environmental layer is delivered as GeoJSON, so both integrate directly into standard GIS and mapping tooling.

Can we consume the data as periodic exports rather than live calls?

Yes. You can call the API directly, or arrange for our data services to deliver scheduled exports of the boundaries, demographics and permit data your departments need.

How do you keep demographic and permit data current?

Demographics are census-derived and permits are normalized from source municipalities on an ongoing basis; we can confirm coverage and refresh cadence for your jurisdictions during onboarding.

Is provincial privacy compliance addressed as well as PIPEDA?

Yes. Data is hosted in Canadian data centres with PIPEDA compliance by default and provincial privacy compliance built into the architecture, and Neighbourly supplies reference data rather than personal records.

What about procurement and pilots?

We support pilots and can provide documentation for procurement review. Contact us to start.

Related pages
API

Geospatial Data API
API

Demographics API
API

Building Permit Data API
API

Environmental Data API
Platform

Coverage by Province & City
Audience

All Industries

Ready to build a shared location layer?

Tell us about your department's data challenges and the programs you're trying to connect. We'll show you how Neighbourly fits into the public sector stack.

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