Now that, for the most part, the horrible months of winter are behind us, we can turn our sun starved gazes towards the most cherished of civics amenities. Yes, I am referring to those unique public/private spaces: our Canadian patios.

You see, I have simple goal here at lgeo and that is to get GIS information to the masses as quickly and as efficiently as possible. And by GIS information, I mean: Beer, in the sunshine. So, with that lofty goal in mind, I've managed to make a good start on this, and will have an app to help sort out thirsty Canadians in the medium term.

For right now though, I'll walk you through one case study of patios, sunshine and all good things GIS.

The Toronto Case Example

To find sunny patios anywhere, we need some data to start with. Fortunately for us, the open data revolution is making this easier than ever before. Presented below is the sunny patio recipe that I've cooked up to make this happen:

1 Massive buildings dataset with heights that is reasonably up-to-date;

1 digital elevation model of reasonable accuracy and precision;

1 list of every patio in town;

and the capacity to build a solar shading model for an entire day at regular intervals; and

some GIS wizadry to put it all together!

See, so easy! Now, thanks to the very good folks at open data Toronto, I've managed to locate a great list of businesses with patios, an awesome buildings dataset and the aforementioned elevation model. I've got the last two bullets down pat so here we go.

The hardest part of all of this was getting the patios in the right spot. Patios come in many flavors including roof patios, back patios, side and front patios, arcades and random corporate office balconies. And in case you were wondering, Toronto has like 1,400 of these so that took some time. Thankfully, GIS is really good at automating data management stuff like moving patios off of the middle of buildings to the block face so it wasn't too bad. Just in case you wanted to get an idea of the level of accuracy that I needed, here are some shots of how well these things are located (Torontonians see if you can guess the street in the comments):