  We present a detailed analysis of the 3+1-split formalism of gravity in the
presence of a cosmological constant. The formalism helps revealing the intimate
connection between holography and the initial value formulation of gravity. We
show that the various methods of holographic subtraction of divergences
correspond just to different transformations of the canonical variables, such
that the initial value problem is properly set up at the boundary. The
renormalized boundary energy momentum tensor is a component of the Weyl tensor.
