The City of Cape Town says it is the first South African megacity to initiate a geographical information systems (GIS) project for the electronic storage and retrieval of its road and storm water plans.
The pilot project, which involved scanning, storing and indexing 5 000 plans, was successfully completed last year.
The second phase of the project is now under way and involves getting 20 000 additional historical plans online before financial year-end in June, and introducing a process to capture and store all new plans online.
The city hopes to complete scanning and storage of all 85 000 plans in three years.
GIS company DLK Spatial Information Systems is helping the City of Cape Town through the visual plan storage and retrieval systems by managing the planning workshops to develop the system and then develop the database.
Rodney Steinhofel, manager of transport information in the city`s Directorate of Transport, Roads and Storm Water, launched the initiative last year to improve the access to information by the municipality`s engineering staff and the public.
"Currently, roads and storm water maps are stored in 10 district offices around the 2 457 square kilometres of the city. Accessing a map can take days. The first step is to accurately determine at which office it is held and then visiting that office," he says.
This situation has been aggravated during the past 10 to 15 years by the consolidation of municipal boundaries. Cape Town comprises many former local councils that were merged into seven municipalities, which have now been consolidated into the new City of Cape Town.
"Maps frequently moved offices as local authority boundaries changed and pinning down a map`s location is a time-consuming, manual slog," Steinhofel says.
The new procedure being implemented will capture and spatially locate each plan, irrespective of which district it is currently in.
New plans logged at the city`s district offices will be scanned, indexed and available online within 10 working days of receipt. Once plans are scanned they will be archived on premises with lower rentals than the A-grade office accommodation in which they are currently stored.
The plans are scanned into a .pdf format and the geographical location of the plans is captured as a polygon in ArcView.
An Access database designed by DLK Spatial Information Systems` manager Sue Binedell helps retrieve the stored information.
The database and geographically located files are then integrated with the department`s infrastructure management system, which is accessed on the desktop and customer-access counters via the city`s intranet.
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