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Helpful Places

Government of Canada – DTPR AI Register

AI-Powered Semantic Search for Canadian Geospatial Data

Wayfinding & Services

What it collects

About behaviour
Anonymized data
  • Search queries entered by members of the public on the GEO.ca portal, including the text and natural language terms used to search for geospatial data.
Operational data
Anonymized data
  • The catalogue of Canadian geospatial data from federal, provincial, and territorial governments hosted on GEO.ca, which serves as the corpus the search system retrieves from.
Run by
Natural Resources Canada (NRCan)
Where
No fixed location
Kept
Not stated by the Helpful Places.
Shared with
Not stated by the Helpful Places.
Your copy
You cannot see the data it holds about you. What you can do

What it is for

Wayfinding & Services

This AI system powers the search function on GEO.ca, a federal web portal that brings together Canada's open geospatial data from federal, provincial, and territorial governments. It uses large language model technology to interpret the meaning and context behind user search queries, returning more relevant results than traditional keyword matching. The system is used by members of the public, and according to the official register, users are not currently informed that AI is being used to process their searches.

What it collects and what happens to it

Data taken in

About behaviour
Anonymized data
  • Search queries entered by members of the public on the GEO.ca portal, including the text and natural language terms used to search for geospatial data.
Operational data
Anonymized data
  • The catalogue of Canadian geospatial data from federal, provincial, and territorial governments hosted on GEO.ca, which serves as the corpus the search system retrieves from.

Processing

Language Models
  • Large language model (LLM) technology is used to perform natural language processing and semantic understanding of search queries, capturing user intent and context beyond keyword matching.
Search & Retrieval
  • Semantic search and retrieval pipeline that surfaces relevant geospatial datasets from the GEO.ca catalogue in response to natural language queries, using vector or embedding-based similarity rather than exact keyword matching.

What it does

Understanding (Semantic AI)
Human decides
  • The system interprets the intent and context behind user search queries using large language model technology, returning semantically relevant results. Users then decide which datasets to access and use.

Outputs

A recommendation or prediction
Anonymized data
  • Ranked list of geospatial datasets recommended to the user in response to their search query, reflecting the AI system's interpretation of query intent and semantic relevance.

Run by

Natural Resources Canada (NRCan)
  • Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) is the federal department responsible for deploying and operating the GEO.ca geospatial data portal and its AI-powered semantic search engine.

Government of Canada AI Register — 2526-NRCan-RNCan-015

Built by

Government of Canada
  • The system was developed by the Government of Canada. No third-party vendor is identified in the register entry.

Government of Canada AI Register — 2526-NRCan-RNCan-015

Kept for

Not stated by the Helpful Places.

Shared with

Not available to me
  • No information is provided in the register about individuals being able to access data the AI system processes about their queries. The register also notes that AI use is not disclosed to users.

Stored

Not stated by the Helpful Places.

How to read the colours

Can it identify you?

Anonymized data
Data about people with the link to who is broken. Stripped of identifiers, blurred, aggregated, or noised so this system can’t reasonably tie a record back to an individual.
Pseudonymous data
Each person’s data is tied to a token (hash, ID, template) that lets this system recognise the same person across events, but the token itself doesn’t reveal a name. Reidentification is possible with extra information.
Identifiable data
The data either contains a direct identifier (name, address, account name, recognisable face or voice, plate number) or carries a token this system uses to look up legal identity during processing.

Who completes the loop?

Human decides
This mode suggests; a person decides what to do next. The AI is always advisory — a human is in the loop on every decision. Example: a triage tool ranks cases for a clinician who chooses which to see first.
Human executes
This mode decides; a person carries out the result. Example: an optimizer plans the day’s trash-collection routes, and drivers run them.
Autonomous
This mode decides and acts on its own. No person reviews each decision or carries out the resulting action.

Definitions from the DTPR standard. Amber is about your data, violet about who decides. The fuller the shape and the deeper the colour, the more identifying the data or the less a person is involved.

What you can do

Ask about this system

Questions go to the Helpful Places, not the vendor.

Your rights

  • Right to Be Informed of AI UseAccording to the official register, AI use is currently not disclosed to users of GEO.ca. Members of the public searching the portal are not informed that their queries are processed by an AI system. No mechanism for exercising this right is described in the available source material.
  • Right to Algorithmic TransparencyThe register entry contains a general description of how the semantic search system works using large language models and NLP techniques. No dedicated public-facing transparency documentation or contact for further information is identified in the available source material.

Risks and safeguards

  • Societal & cultural harmThe system could produce systematically biased or lower-quality search results for queries in French or Indigenous languages if the underlying LLM was trained primarily on English data, potentially creating unequal access to geospatial information. The register does not describe specific mitigation strategies for language or cultural bias. Recommended mitigations include multilingual evaluation of search quality and testing with diverse query terms.