In this model, the server should be located at the People’s Committee Office of district 5 while other clients are located at their places in the committee precinct. In general, the GIS of district 5 will be a professional system with 6 components: hardware, software, data, procedure, orgaware, and humanware. However, in order to reuse effectively and early old land-use and housing information stored on paper maps, this project is considered as the first stage of implementing a professional system concentrated on building up a database and automating some necessarily functional procedures.
Consequently, the first version of DIGIS would:
- Hardware: take full advantage of existing hardware including workstation computers, printers, and other devices.
- Software: reuse operating software and be equipped with ArcView GIS 3.2.
- Data: gather all of existing data, put them all together to be ready for updating and retreiving by any GISs. That was an important objective of this project. Data of DIGIS were designed into 2 types: basic data and thematic data. Thematic data could be created from paper or digital maps, statistical tables, or other documents. All of paper-based data were vectorized into computer as shapefile data. However, this issue could not be finished at an expected time because some data were being completed, especially the planning data, parallelly with the project. At the end of the project, over 15 spatial data layers and many non-spatial data tables were achieved for DIGIS.
- Procedures: automate some principal business processes as automatic procedures. They have made the system more effectively. Procedures were classified into 5 toolboxes: core applications toolbox, planning applications toolbox, land-use and housing’s applications toolbox, public work’s applications toolbox, and state house’s applications toolbox.
- Organization: not be mentioned in this version of the project. A framework for the system is needed to make it more professional. However, due to the scope of this version of the project, this job will be done in the next project.
- Training: train basic knowledge for the district’s staffs. This is one of the important issues to make the system available soon. The project got enthusiasm of the district’s staffs. Over 15 people were taught the basic GIS knowledge and how to use DIGIS tools.
In summary, the aims of the project were established at 3 components of GIS: data, procedures, and training. In the future projects, all of 6 components of GIS should be considered to build up a more professional system to help the local government improve their managing tasks and widen their services to the citizen.
3 The Procedures to be Implemented in District 5 of HCMC
Although district 5 is one of the old and stable districts in HCMC, its government is responsible for managing thousands of houses, lands, and public works. They have a lot of business processes that need to be automated with the new generation of information technology, the geographic information technology to strengthen their managing capacity and authority. However, at the beginning of the use of GIS, district 5 wanted to be supported with GIS in managing land-use and housing. The tools, hence, were designed for updating ownership data, retreiving land-use and housing data, making reports, drawing planning boundaries, manipulating areas of planning-violated houses, managing public lavatories, and managing state houses. They were classified into 5 toolboxes as the model below:
Fig.4: The structure of DIGIS 1.0 software applying in the District 5