Harare City Council is set to digitalise its operations through the Geographical Information System (GIS)...
The early benefits to the Zimbabweian city are expected to include upping the number of people in the city who pay for the water they receive. The donor of the project also provided eight computers and will support the city until 2014 when the project should be up and running.
Soon any place or building in Dubai can be located and reached on a digital map that will be available in different languages on smart mobiles, Tablet PCs, notebooks, and navigation devices.
The maps are more accurate than previous location finders as they will direct the user to the doorstep of the required location, describes Hussain Nassir Lootah, Director General of Dubai Municipality.
"This will be achieved by creating a national coordinate grid on a digital map, developing applications and fixing plates that carries location information on all the buildings in Dubai," tells Abdul Hakim [Municipal GIS Director].
Garmin is behind the app and it appears businesses at least will need to pay for their own unique ID.
Stevens County, MN, is augmenting its investment in GIS with a staff GIS technician.
Up to this point, the county has invested about $128,000 into GIS technology, primarily to build a layered base to attach GIS data to and develop elevation and visual maps of the county. If the county chose not to move forward with hiring a GIS technician, this data and investment could have become obsolete.
The cost of the technician and related expenses:
The salary and benefits for the new GIS Technician are estimated at about $55,300 per year, and the county will need to make an initial investment of $8,000 for hardware and software. The cost to maintain the GIS software each year is about $1,500.
Montana CIO Dick Clark has announced his intention to retire from his position effective Dec. 31. Why is that important? He was a key player in multi-state initiatives:
Perhaps most notable is a multi-state GIS cloud storage project, aggregating data from Montana, Oregon, Utah and Colorado. Montana is also working with Oregon on a collaborative disaster recovery effort, and has recently entered into a mutual assistance agreement with the Idaho Tax Commission that would keep taxation functionality intact in the event of a natural disaster.
- GovTech
Clark get geo. Among his five suggestions for his replacement is a focus on geo:
4. Geospatial
Every data set should be geo-coded, Clark said, because it always comes back to a place, for the most part."In other words, ‘How much money did I spend on inoculations in downtown Helena versus downtown Billings?’ We already kind of know that, but I think that becomes a part of transparency efforts so that people can see where the issues are and how government reacted to them." And there will be people out there who won't like it. "i.e. ‘You spent more money there than you spent on us,’" he said. "That's really what it's all about is having that public policy debate and figuring out how to get better at it. I think all data sets need to be looked at for geo-spatial coding."
- GovTech
