GeoOttawa & city map data
Parcel lines, footprints, overlays—the usual GIS stack. That’s the canvas setbacks and envelopes get drawn on.
Resources
What goes into an address check
Zoned is basically: city maps and parcel geometry, plus whatever the by-law says for that zone string, rolled into one place. It doesn’t replace reading your own schedule or talking to the city when it matters.
Inputs we lean on
Official layers first. Everything else is interpretation and software on top—useful, fallible.
Zoning by-law & schedules
Tables, exceptions, suffixes—2026 doc or whatever applies to your file. The app tries to encode that logic; typos and edge cases still happen.
People in the field
Contractors and designers still carry what GIS doesn’t: site conditions, client scope, what the planner will actually push back on. Zoned is a shared starting point, not the meeting.
Manual pass vs one lookup
Rough split—your mileage varies with how deep you’d go anyway.
By hand
- Tab between map, PDF, and notes.
- Re-read tables when the code string isn’t vanilla.
- Easy for two people to assume different defaults.
In Zoned
- One address pulls map + encoded rules together.
- Output is only as good as the data and the code path for that string.
- Still verify for permit work.
If something looks wrong, trust the published by-law and the city over any app.