The City of Johannesburg has partnered with AfriGIS, a location-based services company, in a street verification project expected to be completed by the end of May.
AfriGIS won a tender that was issued by the city two years ago, to design a project to centralise and update property address information onto one database: the Land Information System (LIS).
The City of Johannesburg's records for address information is currently fragmented in separate databases located in different council departments.
Retha van Wyk, City of Johannesburg acting deputy director for data administration and mapping, says: “Historically, the different metropolitan local councils allocated and maintained street addresses according to their own standards and methodologies.
“As a result, some areas within the City of Johannesburg used different combinations of stand numbers, plot numbers and farm portion numbers. This, in turn, meant some properties could not be uniquely identified and duplication occurred within the database.”
Van Wyk explains that the council decided to develop its LIS as the single source of property information in the city.
“The LIS contains property-related workflow processes that cut across departments, is spatially enabled, and provides an interface to the billing system, which runs on SAP.”
The project, which will update address information into a single database, is expected to improve council service delivery and billing to the correct properties.
It is also hoped that it will improve the response time of emergency services, such as ambulances and the police, by providing them with the correct destination.
Big undertaking
AfriGIS has been tasked by the council to update about 400 000 street addresses in total, using geographic information system (GIS) technology, such as US imported digital cameras with built-in GPS.
AfriGIS's field workers take pictures of each stand, and each photograph has coordinates imprinted on them, which are then logged onto the LIS database.
Approximately 18 000 photos of street addresses have already been captured using the digital cameras. The data is then compared with the recorded street numbers on the GIS database to verify its accuracy.
“AfriGIS is tasked to verify current addresses and addresses reserved for future use, as well as matching addresses between the City of Johannesburg's database and AfriGIS's National Address Database (NAD),” says AfriGIS MD Magnus Rademeyer.
In addition, AfriGIS is tasked to allocate new street numbers in certain areas. Those numbers are logged into the city's LIS street address database.
According to Van Wyk, phase one of the project was completed in April last year. About 80 000 property stands and 680 townships in Johannesburg were verified against the city's NAD. Some 35 500 addresses were captured using GIS and 400 new addresses were recorded into the system.
The project is now in phase two, during which a total of 1 500 Johannesburg townships have been verified and 120 000 street addresses were captured by the end of September.
An estimated 100 000 stands and 4 200 townships still require verification.
Van Wyk says the LIS is now the only source of property-related information for the city and expects that operations within the city will improve.
Cost benefits
Charl Fouche, director of AfriGIS, says the outcome of the project will increase the number of recorded addresses in the city. This will lead to more invoices being sent from the council to residential addresses and more people will be paying for services such as water and electricity.
“This will benefit the city and the public services because billing statements will be going to the correct addresses and, as such, the city will be receiving more money from the public and will effectively lower service rates.” He says there will be more funds available for the city to plough back into infrastructure.
Fouche adds that not only is the city seeing cost benefits, but residents are also benefiting. “In new areas, where there are houses being built with stand numbers, there's always been issues with the bank, as they don't have legitimate address information - the city is now allocating those stands a formal address and integrating them into a formal database system.”
According to Fouche, address information will be updated every week.
“The municipality is communicating with the residents. The forms with the new address information will be delivered to the residents and a call centre will be up and running next month.”
Arthur Goldstuck, MD of World Wide Worx, says the project will benefit the public, as well as municipal services, emergency, health and social services as addresses will be recorded onto a centralised system.
“The new database will affect the council's ability to allocate services, but also the public to navigate their way through Johannesburg. As a solution, it's definitely the right way to go.”
The public can access their street address information on the City of Johannesburg's Web site.
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