A bit of history...
The adoption of the NHN Standard by the Canadian Council on Geomatics (CCOG) is the result of an important partnership endeavour. Following several national meetings, the standard was conceived and finally approved.
At its fall 2001 meeting in Fredericton, the CCOG endorsed the GeoBase initiative in order to improve the quality of base geospatial data offered to Canadians. During this meeting, Nova Scotia Geomatics Centre (NSGC) and Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) were asked to demonstrate the feasibility of a distributed data base.
This demonstration was accomplished during a special meeting of the CCOG in Ottawa in the spring of 2002, and the definition of a unique standard for a National Hydro Network (NHN) appeared as the next logical step. This mandate was again given to the NSGC and NRCan team. Recognizing both the specific expertise and experience of the British Columbia's Base Mapping & Geomatic Services (BMGSBC) with regards to hydrography, the partners invited the latter to contribute to efforts directed at defining an NHN standard. BC's representatives have since been highly involved in the NHN creation process.
At its fall 2002 meeting in Victoria, the CCOG recognized and praised the NRN (National Road Network) consultative approach in defining the National Standard. This approach was thus clearly recommended for the development of the NHN, as well.
Since the Victoria meeting, an impressive consultation work was achieved. In all, more than ten workshop meetings, gathering data producers and users, were held in regards to the development of the NHN standard. In addition, two national consultations involving federal, provincial and territorial stakeholders took place.
In February 2003, after nearly a year of shared work by NSGC, BMGSBC and NRCan to develop the NHN standard, a first national consultation was held. To that effect, two workshops held in Winnipeg and Halifax were organized and coordinated by NRCan. The objective of these workshops was to inform participants and also gather comments from federal and provincial/territorial stakeholders at the national scale.
A second national consultation was held in Montreal in March 2004. After nearly 2 years of development, the NHN model was fairly stable. The group then proposed a first NHN standard version. The NHN project presentation to federal and provincial/territorial stakeholders during this consultation allowed them to validate and support the approach.
Finally, in August 2004, the first NHN Standard version was endorsed by CCOG and thereby became a national standard.
After the NHN Standard was nationally adopted, the team from the Centre for Topographic Information Sherbrooke (CTIS) was given the mandate to implement the NHN. The latter is implemented under the leadership of the National Hydro Network Project from the NRCan Earth Sciences Sector Contribution to GeoBase Program. Discussions to produce NHN data in partnership were then engaged with some provincial/territorial partners. Agreements had been concluded with British Columbia, Manitoba and Yukon. On October 1st 2007, the day of the NHN product official launch on the GeoBase Portal, most of the 287 NHN datasets published resulted from those agreements.
However, the experience gained through this initial NHN data production questioned the prevailing approach to create the NHN data layer in Canada. A deep reflection led to the development of a new NHN Implementation Strategy. Since then, NHN data production is driven by this strategy.
The NHN Completeness Levels concept was born with this strategy. Direct results from this are NHN datasets now showing different completeness levels on the GeoBase portal.