One of our researchers is looking for latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates for Census Divisions. If available, where can this be found? Is there any advice or documentation relating to the computing of the centroids? Or might this be available through a custom product?
Answer
Attached, you’ll find a PCensus Pointfile (an Excel spreadsheet) that provides X-Y coordinates at the Census Division level for all of Canada, based on the 2011 Census. You can also go to: <http://hamstermap.com> visualize these points (coordinates had to be inversed to Y-X, or Lat-Long).
GeoPortal does not calculate centroids upon export to .csv. The csv data you get is a representation of the boundary polygon areas, with shape area and length. However, you can use the boundaries to calculate centroids in ArcMap or equivalent. The way to obtain centroids for this layer would be to download it from the GeoPortal as needed (full dataset or a section), bring it in to ArcMap and use the ‘Feature to point’ ArcMap Toolbox tool that would great a point file from the polygons using the centroid of each polygon. The centroid of each polygon is embedde. For some DMTI layers, the centroids are provided, but not all. These would still need to be calculated, but it’s pretty simple as described above.
