GIT Developments in central Europe: Hungary as a case study
In Hungary, land management is under the purview of the Ministry of Agriculture and
Rural Development. The real estate record centers are the land offices. The 19
counties and Budapest all have county land offices, with 115 district land offices
under their authority. In 1995, concurrently with the National Cadastre Program, the
program targeting the modernization of the 115 district land offices was launched,
with assistance from the European Union. The installation of 115 computer bases
was completed, but the rapid development of hardware made these systems
obsolete just a few years after their installation. The modernization of the county land
offices was initiated much later, and the National Cadastre Program could not provide
the digital cadastral base map sets quickly. Therefore, the modernization of the land
management system is progressing at a very slow pace.
Thus, digital land survey base map sets are already available for a significant
percentage of the surface of Hungary, but the situation is far from ideal. This
fundamentally affects GIS projects for which the existence of digital base maps is a
prerequisite. For the creation of municipal management or planning, or a public utility
management system, a modern digital cadastral base map is essential. So these
systems can only be developed in those areas where these digital data are available.
Developments at Large Public Utility Companies
Only a portion of GIS developments at public utility companies is based on digital
cadastral base maps, and this is usually the less important of these projects. Public
utility companies need integrated systems that handle three key types of information:
- technical IT, used to manage the most important tools (the network)
- consumer services, directed towards the most important business partners
- work management systems, managing the most important resources
GIS is able to provide the link between the consumer and the network, and supports
work management through its identification system and the geographical relationship
system.
The first Hungarian utility to break into the field of GIS was the Budapest Electricity
Works, which issued an invitation to tender in 1990 for the creation of the digital map
of its low-voltage network. By the mid 1990s, this system covered the utility’s entire
service area (over 4000 square km) and an upgraded version is still in use today.
Water Works Budapest also initiated its “Network Information System” in the early
1990s, with the same objective: to support technical work processes (consumption
data, dispatch service, network calculations).
Additional GIS projects were initiated in 1993 at the Gas Company of Budapest, as
well as at the Trans-Tisza and the Transdanubian gas companies. In 1995, the
development of a technical information system for the Budapest District Heating
Company started, which operates at more than 50 sites. The MATÁV (Hungarian
Telecom), as well as several provincial electric companies, initiated large scale IT
developments in 1996.
During the second half of the 1990s, privatization of the large public utility companies
affected GIS development. Several large telecom providers made their appearance in
the marketplace with GIS development needs.
This brief overview looks very positive, but it would be wrong to overlook the fact that
the majority of the GIS developments in Hungarian public utility companies stopped
at the pilot stage. Some public utility companies made several attempts with various
GIS providers and in different software environments. Surely this is one of the most
expensive ways to proceed, and one that offers the worst possible publicity for GIS
applications.
It is a well-known fact that the most expensive basic component of a GIS system is
the DATA. Unfortunately, in most cases the largest obstacle standing in the way of
development was the lack of good quality data, or that the costly and slow process of
creating the basic data had to precede the development of the GIS.
Hungary is in a good situation regarding basic data for public utility maps. In 1979, an
executive decree was issued making the implementation of a unitary public utility
record mandatory, and site maps were created using traditional methods over the
subsequent two decades. Every public utility company uses these records and
manages the changes in their field of competence. The scale of the traditional site
maps is 1:500, which should represent a very good basis for digital processing. The
problem is that these records are on mylar, and the cadastral base map used is
different from the digital cadastral base maps created later. A solution could be the
digitization of the technical contents and their integration with the existing digital
cadastral base map, but, as experience shows, there are too many contradictions in
the data. An even greater problem is the high cost involved to digitize thousands of
1:500 scale site maps. The public utility companies do not have the funds needed to
support this process. Therefore, the aforementioned GIS developments must usually
instead work with maps on a 1:2000 or a 1:4000 scale.
