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Land Information Systems for muncipal planning
Administrative departments manage large databases that necessary for the legal and fiscal management tasks of a municipality. These type of base systems typically deal with the registration of population, land ownership, real estate, businesses, public institutions, etc. Primarily, these systems are applications of regular relational database management packages and for the most part are routinely utilized. It is often useful to link this information to location.
The policy departments within municipal organisations are dealing with preparatory activities for strategic decision making. Tangible products of these departments are zoning plans, master plans, urban renewal plans, housing plans, facility/utility plans, traffic plans and environment protection plans. Policy activities require information at a higher level of generalization and aggregation compared to management and maintenance activities. In order to produce this type of information, large municipalities have separate statistical or policy/management information departments. This information has to be derived from research based complex data analysis.  With respect to the automation of tasks of departments discussed above, various information systems is chosen. Technical departments, usually opt for design oriented systems (CAD: computer aided design), administrative departments select systems specially for alphanumeric data management (DBMS : data base management systems); and planning departments prefer land information systems. Where the introduction of information systems begins is partly due to coincidence. Individual department can play an important role in this respect. In some instances, small scale dedicated solutions on personal computers are the first step. However, the automation of large administrations and registrations can lead to direct and easily demonstrable savings. For this reason, computers have often been installed in these departments first. The automated production of technical maps is highly cost-effective, which explains the wide spread installation of CAD systems. These systems are often combined with database packages to form fully operational automated mapping/facility management systems (AM/FM). The acquisition and implementation of analytical systems is much more problematic. Cost benefit calculations with respect to the use of land information systems for production purposes are difficult to compile, although recently a number of feasibility studies with positive outcomes have been completed. The introduction of LIS has to be justified with a demonstrable qualitative improvement of decision making, which is a complicated task. Moreover, individuals working in planning departments are usually more reluctant and skeptical than in other departments of municipal organization, causing delay in the startup of computer support for planning activities.  The installation of different systems (CAD, DBMS and LIS) is characteristic for the first round of automation. The systems have the functionality for design, management and analysis tasks. Various modules have been added to CAD-packages as well as analytical systems have been upgraded for more design functionality. Most large LIS software packages are now interfaced with the major commercial DBMS-packages and are adopted to operate in a client server network environment based on UNIX workstations or windows. This development gives much more flexibilities and opportunities for distributed information processing solutions with central databases, local databases and also dedicated for specific applications. |