The Igliniit Project is an International Polar Year (IPY) project that took place in Clyde River, Nunavut, Canada, from 2006 to 2010 and is currently looking to obtain funding to continue on into the future. The project brought together local Inuit hunters and geomatics engineering students from the University of Calgary to design and build a tool to assist hunters in documenting their observations of the environment.

This tool, the Igliniit Tool, consists of a GPS receiver, mobile weather station, PDA and digital camera mounted onto a snowmobile. All the components of the tool are managed by specially designed software running on the PDA that allows the Inuit hunters to log information as they hunt and travel around Baffin Island.

The primary product of the Igliniit Project to date has been paper maps. Currently these are created in collaboration with the Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre (GCRC) at Carleton University, using several standalone software packages to produce maps using the Igliniit Tool data output. These maps have to be created manually by people with technical GIS skills, and also requires expensive proprietary software licenses.

(example of current map output)

The current map-making process is inefficient and time-consuming, and when the project scales up with more users, will become unsustainable. One of the goals of the Igliniit Project is to have a complete "plug-and-play" package where users can download data and print their own maps. The need for an automatic mapping application forms the basis of this research, and resulted in the creation of the Igliniit Viewer.