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3 Key Application Areas
Once in possession of a basic set of information on localities in the municipality, along with information from census sectors, it was possible to plan and implement a vast range of applications. Several different geographic applications have already come up and have been implemented, and others are being presently developed. The most important are the following:

3.1 Education: The School Registration System
For six years, Belo Horizonte has had a geographical application software which makes it possible to determine the most suitable state or municipal school for each student. Using this resource, the parents register their children at a post office, and are informed about which school to enroll at by mail. Until 1992, school registration in Belo Horizonte was done at the schools themselves with each school administering its own enrollment requests. When the number of students exceeded the number of places, the parents were obliged to find another school. In order to avoid this problem, they usually enrolled their children at more than one school, causing more problems to the already confused network of state/municipal education.

In the new system, the parents did not need to go to the school to enroll their children. They would go to a post office and fill in an enrollment form. With this information, the enrollment committee was able to place the child in the most suitable school. Each registration request has an address, which is automatically localized geographically. From the geographic location of the student's home, it is decided which is the most suitable school for him/her, according to a division of the city in school jurisdictions, and physical proximity. The jurisdictions are defined by the Education Secretary and by the Regional Administrations, bearing in mind physical obstacles (dual carriageways and geographic obstacles), and the size of each school [2].

The development of this procedure of school registration made it possible to distribute the schools' capacity in a more democratic way. Unlike other cities, where long queues and a lottery for places often occur, in Belo Horizonte the process is totally resolved by one visit to the Post Office, and the posting out of the results. In 1993, the school enrollment system in Belo Horizonte was featured on national television, and was presented as a model of local management of state/municipal education.

3.2 Transportation and traffic:



On the geographical database, a large amount of information is available concerning the transportation system and traffic in Belo Horizonte, including: the localization of each traffic sign and each set of traffic lights; all one-way streets; legal turns, bus-stops, and bus routes.

The georeferenced information on the transportation system is of fundamental importance for a series of activities currently being carried out at Belo Horizonte's transportation and traffic company, centered on a computer-based public transportation management system [8]. Other projects, such as the restructuring of the public transportation system and the plan for restructuring the road traffic in the central area of Belo Horizonte, have been able to use this powerful instrument, as a database, in their analysis and generation of scenarios, or as a base for simulations.

The use of geoprocessing technology in the creation of the transportation and traffic system of Belo Horizonte has been fundamental in the achievement of the aims of the municipal administration in the area. The growth of a geoprocessing culture at at Belo Horizonte's transportation and traffic company has enabled the development of several other applications which will benefit from the quality of the original database and the previous efforts to produce new alternatives and solutions.

3.3 Urban Planning Applications
In December 1996, Belo Horizonte's legislative has approved a new Master Plan Law. All of the studies done for the elaboration of this plan and for the development of the Urban Life Quality Index (ULQI), a fundamental instrument in the monitoring the impacts of public intervention and actions, were assisted by using GIS and specialized information. ULQI benefited particularly from GIS usage, as it provides the measurement of the citizen's quality of life based upon the availability and accessibility of public services. Developing the sophisticated indicators that compose the index would not have been possible without the geoprocessing system [3]. It was necessary not only to determine the distribution, by regions, of service providers and urban real estate, but also to determine how difficult it is for the citizen to reach services that are not available in their respective neighborhoods. Going beyond a simple supply analysis regarding urban services and infrastructure, GIS tools made it possible to analyze accessibility an to make it possible to combine specialized information from various sources in the development of the index

The Regional Master Plans are local specializations of the city's Master Plan, and are the fundamental references for public sector interventions, mainly to foresee large urban infrastructure structuring efforts (such as in housing, roadway and traffic systems, or sanitation). The use of GIS has been a fundamental aid in the formulation of regional plans for Belo Horizonte.

The geoprocessing system was also utilized for the production of maps in the new Law of Land Parcelling, Occupation and Use (1996), allowing them to be published in large volumes. The municipal administration is responsible for publishing these maps, along with all materials necessary to understand the law, including map keys and summary tables. Therefore, the municipal administration was required to adequately publish the information regarding the new law, disseminating information, hence informing interested citizens and supporting the work of professionals in the fields of architecture, urban development, real estate market, civil construction and others. The following information needed to be prepared for publication: land use zoning, presented in the form of thematic maps in color; Special Guideline Areas (SGA), regions in which zoning has additional restrictions due to local characteristics; street network hierarchy (arterial, collector, regional link and local thoroughfares); indication of roadway expansion priority areas as defined by the Master Plan; and a table containing the width of all thoroughfares in the city.

The information on the new law was incorporated into a geographic base, already available, showing not only data necessary for the compilation of maps, but mainly the information required by the computer applications that were used to provide operational support to the municipal administration in the execution of the plan. All architectural design approvals, as well as economic activities operation permits, started to be readily issued considering the requirements of the new law. All of the georeferenced information was transformed into alphanumeric information and incorporated to the city's conventional database systems.

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