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Bringing the citizens closer to local government: The innovative GIS of the La Coruña Local Council
Jaume Royo Llobet
GIS Director
TAO-gedas
jaume.royo@tao.es
José Manuel Peña Penabad
Head of Planning, Budget and Management Control
La Coruña Local Council
jpena@aytolacoruna.es
Jaume Royo Llobet
GIS Director
TAO-gedas
jaume.royo@tao.es
José Manuel Peña Penabad
Head of Planning, Budget and Management Control
La Coruña Local Council
jpena@aytolacoruna.es
ABSTRACT
One of the greatest challenges facing Local Government in the 21st century is keeping up with the demands of the citizens. This means local councils taking on efficient management of resources, planning and taking responsible decisions, and, above all, keeping the public up to date on information and opening the way to their participation. Until recently, for most Spanish local governments, cartography and geographical information systems (hereinafter GIS) seemed to have little to do with these issues. The question in political and managerial circles was always the same: why invest a good deal of money in cartography if in the end it will only be used by a handful of specialists, and so would affect neither the bulk of internal management nor relations with the general public. The failure of some emblematic projects helped to further marginalize cartography and GIS, pushing them to the edge of investments in the modernisation of local governments.
As a contrast to this biased view of cartography and GIS tools, are initiatives such as the corporative GIS set up a couple of years ago by the La Coruña Local Council. The GIS system in La Coruña is intended to become a true catalyst for a modern and efficient organisation that is close to the public. In the following lines we investigate the inherent difficulties of a project with these characteristics, the results of the same and the future challenges that La Coruña's GIS will have to face to keep the public informed and encourage them to participate in local management.
THE ORIGINS OF THE PROJECT
One of the strategic commitments adopted by La Coruña Council in 2003, was to put cartography on the map; that is to say put cartography to the forefront of local management. In theory this seemed straightforward; to design and implement a transverse information system that would allow the maintenance and use of cartography, and which would integrate progressively with the different processes and information flows from the different functional areas of the municipal council.
However, the GIS has to be built around an existing system. This meant a number of advantages, such as having qualified personnel within the organisation itself and a suitable technological infrastructure, as well as having an information database (local census, taxes, etc.) available which could be linked up to the cartography, giving it added value.
But the disadvantages largely outweighed the advantages, and significantly determined the strategy to be followed. Firstly, the cartographic information was spread out among different management areas, none of which guaranteed suitable maintenance of it. A wide cross section of cartographic sources, dates and scales were being used together, making it practically impossible to get an overall cartographic vision of the municipal territory. A second negative aspect was the complete lack of an organised territorial information flow within the organisation. There were isolated CAD and GIS user groups, but they did not communicate with one another and were generally quite reluctant to change. Lastly, the number of actual cartography users was very small, possibly due to the factors previously described, but also because of the inexistence of a clear overall strategy in terms of GIS.
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
A scalable, configurable map server
However, one of the goals of the City Council was to be as much independent as possible from GIS suppliers and to concentrate maintenance tasks into a single tool. To achieve this two-fold objective, a powerful configuration module was developed in Microsoft .NET technology, combining manager and authoring capabilities at once. Thus trhough asset of wizards, the GIS administrator of La Coruña City Council is at present able to edit the web-based cartographic project and easily adapt its contents and functionalities to the end user's requirements by:
Figure 2: Access to attribute data from selected features
THE CHALLENGE OF GETTING CLOSER TO THE CITIZENS
The greatest challenge facing local government is to convert its internet portal into a forum for facilitating communication between government and the public. The GIS of the La Coruña Council will make a second leap forward in 2005 with the publication online of part of the information managed by the council. The council already has a cartographic portal which provides access to information on public transport, equipment and tourist information (hotels, restaurants). Yet, the project aims to go further by providing dynamic links between the portal and the maps managed by the council. This will significantly increase the usefulness of the portal for the public, who will be able to request planning certificates through the internet; report incidents detected on the street; track applications; identify and download the maps most suited to a particular engineering project using a metadata search engine; find the best route to go to the conference hall from the hotel, etc. Cartography will also encourage greater participation of the public in defining municipal policies and the decision making process.
One of the greatest challenges facing Local Government in the 21st century is keeping up with the demands of the citizens. This means local councils taking on efficient management of resources, planning and taking responsible decisions, and, above all, keeping the public up to date on information and opening the way to their participation. Until recently, for most Spanish local governments, cartography and geographical information systems (hereinafter GIS) seemed to have little to do with these issues. The question in political and managerial circles was always the same: why invest a good deal of money in cartography if in the end it will only be used by a handful of specialists, and so would affect neither the bulk of internal management nor relations with the general public. The failure of some emblematic projects helped to further marginalize cartography and GIS, pushing them to the edge of investments in the modernisation of local governments.
As a contrast to this biased view of cartography and GIS tools, are initiatives such as the corporative GIS set up a couple of years ago by the La Coruña Local Council. The GIS system in La Coruña is intended to become a true catalyst for a modern and efficient organisation that is close to the public. In the following lines we investigate the inherent difficulties of a project with these characteristics, the results of the same and the future challenges that La Coruña's GIS will have to face to keep the public informed and encourage them to participate in local management.
THE ORIGINS OF THE PROJECT
One of the strategic commitments adopted by La Coruña Council in 2003, was to put cartography on the map; that is to say put cartography to the forefront of local management. In theory this seemed straightforward; to design and implement a transverse information system that would allow the maintenance and use of cartography, and which would integrate progressively with the different processes and information flows from the different functional areas of the municipal council.
However, the GIS has to be built around an existing system. This meant a number of advantages, such as having qualified personnel within the organisation itself and a suitable technological infrastructure, as well as having an information database (local census, taxes, etc.) available which could be linked up to the cartography, giving it added value.
But the disadvantages largely outweighed the advantages, and significantly determined the strategy to be followed. Firstly, the cartographic information was spread out among different management areas, none of which guaranteed suitable maintenance of it. A wide cross section of cartographic sources, dates and scales were being used together, making it practically impossible to get an overall cartographic vision of the municipal territory. A second negative aspect was the complete lack of an organised territorial information flow within the organisation. There were isolated CAD and GIS user groups, but they did not communicate with one another and were generally quite reluctant to change. Lastly, the number of actual cartography users was very small, possibly due to the factors previously described, but also because of the inexistence of a clear overall strategy in terms of GIS.
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
A scalable, configurable map server
However, one of the goals of the City Council was to be as much independent as possible from GIS suppliers and to concentrate maintenance tasks into a single tool. To achieve this two-fold objective, a powerful configuration module was developed in Microsoft .NET technology, combining manager and authoring capabilities at once. Thus trhough asset of wizards, the GIS administrator of La Coruña City Council is at present able to edit the web-based cartographic project and easily adapt its contents and functionalities to the end user's requirements by:
- Simplifying the XML creation process and shortening by more than a half the implementation cycle, independently of the GIS underlying technology..
- Connecting simultaneously to several map servers (ESRI, Intergraph,…) and cartographic formats within one GIS project.
- Seamless accessing to external data warehouses through OLEDB, giving the user the option to query or modify all the data or part of them through filters.
- Managing a pre-publishing environment, the changes in the configuration being available to the ens-users whenever the he decides.
- Defining the GIS web project through advanced configuration tools (query builder, thematic mapping definition, multilingual, batch report printing, intelligent raster catalog generation,…)
- Enabling user access rights to the application contents and its functionalities, both at an individual or group level.
Figure 2: Access to attribute data from selected features
THE CHALLENGE OF GETTING CLOSER TO THE CITIZENS
The greatest challenge facing local government is to convert its internet portal into a forum for facilitating communication between government and the public. The GIS of the La Coruña Council will make a second leap forward in 2005 with the publication online of part of the information managed by the council. The council already has a cartographic portal which provides access to information on public transport, equipment and tourist information (hotels, restaurants). Yet, the project aims to go further by providing dynamic links between the portal and the maps managed by the council. This will significantly increase the usefulness of the portal for the public, who will be able to request planning certificates through the internet; report incidents detected on the street; track applications; identify and download the maps most suited to a particular engineering project using a metadata search engine; find the best route to go to the conference hall from the hotel, etc. Cartography will also encourage greater participation of the public in defining municipal policies and the decision making process.