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Bringing the citizens closer to local government: The innovative GIS of the La Coruña Local Council
THE KEY POINTS OF THE STRATEGY
The limits set by the original goals and the magnitude of the project that was to be undertaken required clear strategic reference points. It was necessary to break with the past and invest efforts into an open and scaleable GIS model, which would be different from the previous one in three key aspects; the quality of the information, a unified cartographic database and a server with scaleable and configurable maps. The commitment to quality cartography: The principal asset of a GIS is cartography. This cartography only constitutes an added value to municipal management and decision-making if it is of good quality and is properly kept through a strict and continuous updating system. The dispersion and variety (in scale, format, etc.) of the existing cartographic sources of the La Coruña Local Council before the start of the project, as well as the inadequate state of conservation of the same, made their use as a cartographic base for the new GIS both expensive and uncertain as to the results. For these reasons the town council decided to invite tenders for a new reference cartography, on a scale of 1:500, of the whole municipal area -3,858 hectares- plus the 150 metre wide border along the edge of the boundaries of neighbouring councils of Arteixo and Culleredo. In total, 4,110 hectares of high quality cartography were handed in, together with aerial views, throughout 2004. The investment needed for this acquisition was €340,000, with an expected successive yearly budget of €100,000 from 2005 for maintenance. The unified cartographic database: The second key aspect of the new GIS of the La Coruña Local Council was to consider cartography as just another type of data, and that as such it should be stored and managed the same as the rest in object oriented databases. The result of this commitment was the creation of a cartographic database in Oracle 9i Spatial, fed from the various maps of the municipal area of La Coruña generated internally - by different departments- and externally - by services companies. The objective of this cartographic database was clear; to bring together all cartographies and territorial information in one single repository using one common form (the newly delivered 1:500 reference cartography), though following different maintenance systems. So, for example, some layers of the infrastructure are edited and updated using CAD tools first and are later transferred to Oracle. On the other hand, the containers of the Environment department area are maintained using a web editor that accesses the unified database directly. An outstanding cartographic viewer: One of the challenges facing the new GIS was to reach the greatest number of users possible. It was essential to avoid cartography from remaining in the hands of a limited number of functional areas and specialists, in order to convert it into an added value directed at a wide range of individuals and organisations, including the general public or citizens (ciudadan@s in Spanish). In order to make cartographic search and visualization tools available for a large number of potential users, it was needed to move away from the traditional web GIS tools and focus on developing a scalable map server without a user limit. The web viewer had to be innovative, easy-to-use and ergonomic, with a heavier version for the intranet (including vector capabilities, rich suite of navigation and viewing tools, SVG printing, analysis, buffering,…) and a lighter version for the internet. Furthermore, all processes and calculation had to run on the server, keeping maintenance close to 0 at client sites and limiting the overall number of licenses (just a browser required by user).  Figure 1: The innovative web cartographic viewer of La Coruña |