Oracle, dept of land affairs work to aid land reform

The Department of Land Affairs (DLA) has initiated a phased implementation of new business systems - including a corporate data warehouse - to support decision-making at the highest levels and enhance the planning processes around land reform in South Africa.

The primary drivers behind the move are the integration of data across many different system platforms and the challenge of interoperability among the various information systems within the DLA and other Government departments.

Oracle technology was selected as the platform for the upgrade.

According to Pregan Pillay, deputy-director, Corporate Information Systems, Dept of Land Affairs, a key objective of the project is to consolidate data in specific repositories, which can then be accessed at will by state planners and administrators.

They will be given a consolidated view of different geographical digital data such as land parcels, roads and infrastructure services in relation to attribute data such as land deeds, land type and ownership and - most importantly - existing claims against the land.

"The data warehouse will store huge amounts of spatial and non-spatial data, while specific `land data` and `business data` are stored and maintained in separate legacy systems," says Pillay. "We want to collate all the information needed from multiple sources to process land claims far quicker than is currently possible."

With this in mind, he says a significant part of the process is to replicate the data of these legacy systems to a modern Object Relational Database Management System (ORDBMS).

"This information - essentially real-time data - would be delivered to the desktops of the key decision makers and officials in the land reform process via the Web," he explains.

Currently, DLA projects typically necessitate planners sourcing and accessing geographic information plus data residing in various legacy mainframe computing systems.

These include cadastral data of individual land parcels from the Survey General in Pretoria, topographical information from the Survey and Mapping Branch in Cape Town, land ownership data, infrastructure information (roads, water, power, education and healthcare) from the relevant authorities.

"It`s a process that can take several months and often key information, such as land ownership, can be out of date by the time everything is collated," he adds.

"Oracle technology provides a stable solution for spatial data storage. It allows users to easily incorporate location information directly into their applications and services," says Ivan Otterstrom, account manager, Local Governance, at Oracle SA.

"It also provides the technology that can be accessed by other systems since it is platform independent and is also totally scalable."

A major benefit of the system is an expected improvement in data integrity. Currently, because of the time taken to collate information, much of the data can be out of date by the time the planner is able to collate it.

"Once the system is implemented, planners will be able to identify discrepancies quickly and provide feedback to the relevant department so that up to date information can be added to the systems making the information much more current than is possible today," adds Ronald Muller, project manager, Systems Development, at the DLA.

The Oracle-based corporate warehouse will also comprise three integrated relational databases. These are land reform and restitution, personnel and financial. The land reform database feeds the spatial system with the data needed to drive the Government`s restitution programme.

All warehouses, apart from the spatial system, previously existed in legacy systems, which are now being moved to the new Oracle 8.1.7 Enterprise Edition environment. The complete warehouse project, which is being developed using Oracle JDeveloper and other tools, is being delivered by a number of external resources. Web enablement is being executed on the Oracle 9iAS Application Server.