|
|
|
Local Spatial Data Infrastructure, Trujillo - Peru
Jose Murgia1, Nelly Amemiya2 and Jan Turkstra3
1 Mayor of Trujillo, calle Franciso Pizarro no. 412, Trujillo – Peru.
2 Head of the urban planning department of Trujillo
3 Corresponding author. Jan Turkstra (turkstra@itc.nl) is at the urban planning and management division of the
International Institute for Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (www.itc.nl), the Netherlands and co-ordinator
for ITC of the PEGUP (educational project on urban management in Peru).
ITC. P.O.Box 6 ; 7500 AA Enschede, The Netherlands,
FAX: + 31.53 4874 575
Abstract
The development of a Municipal Information System or currently better known as a local spatial
data infrastructure is considered complex due to the required inter-institutional relationships. In
many developing countries ICT and GIS’s are introduced but the benefits are modest as no
changes take place in technical and organisational structure of organisations and digital
databases and CAD maps are mushrooming in great variety within different private and public
institutions, municipal organisations and even within single departments.
Many national mapping agencies are not able to provide large-scale digital urban base maps
while the absence or low quality of cadastres makes that basic core data sets are unavailable or
inaccessible. The results are that duplication and incompatible data are frequently observed and
also donor driven stand-alone projects have a limited impact through the lack of institutional
embedding and are not able to mature from the project to the institutional level. However a
positive sign is that there is an increasing awareness among data producers and consumers
that investments in the development of digital data sets should be combined to reduce costs
and increase benefits from GIS and ICT technology.
Within the local administration, and also among the society at large, there is an increasing
awareness that environmental management is urgently required (Agenda 21). It is within this
context that the three major cities of Peru; Lima, Arequipa and Trujillo developed environmental
atlases over the last three years.
An atlas is defined as an intentional combination of maps, structured in such a way that given
objectives are reached (Kraak and Ormeling, 1996). The purposes of the thematic atlases in
Peru are, besides the provision of environmental information, also to develop municipal
information systems through the use of (geographic) data standards and inter-institutional
agreements.
The atlases must be seen as an attractive product of a process to develop and strengthen
relationships between producers and consumers of environmental and other geographical data-sets
such as census and cadastre. This requires political will and an institutional willingness to
cooperate and interchange information.
This paper describes the concept of a local spatial data infrastructure for the city of Trujillo. A
fiscal cadastre system and an urban environmental atlas are the tangible products of such a
data infrastructure. The paper concludes with some comments on the institutional and political
requirements for the successful development of a local spatial data infrastructure and stresses
that such an infrastructure is not a product but an incremental development process that will
progress only in case such a process is simple, cost effective, user-friendly, and flexible with
clear products. Political interest and institutional stability and genuine interest for inter-institutional
cooperation will add much to the success of this process.
|
|
|