City of Liege
Overview
Information managed by the Urban Department encompassed almost all the areas of responsibility of the City of Liege (located in Belgium). From there came the idea of creating a Cartography Cell to unite the mapping data into a Geographic Information System (GIS). Its main objective was to coordinate data production for the Urban Department, to bring expertise and experience to other departments and to coordinate the information collected and managed into an information system.
The City of Liege is currently using several separate data production servers. Data from these servers are published to a distribution server: the mapping portal that allows City employees and officers to have direct access to data relating to the different services. There are three major essential databases maintained according to their own frequencies. They constitute the core of the information used daily by officers:
- The land parcel database, supplied by the Federal Public Service, and the area planning data which is essential for the Urban Department and is supplied by the Public Service of Wallonia, are updated annually.
- The street database, produced by the Cartography Cell is updated once an order decides of the name of a road or when major changes take place.
- The address database, produced by the Cartography Cell is updated daily.
Additional data is captured on top of these three large databases such as the towns’ properties, street cleaning routes, a retail property database, the location of the planning applications or licences, etc. Other data is captured semi-automatically (mobility access) or manually (trees, heritage sites) and may require post-processing to refine or characterise objects.
Significant data from the Public Service of Wallonia (SPW) is integrated into the GIS to contribute to analysis performed by the Planning Department. They are updated annually or read directly from the SPW web server.
Data is accessible via an intranet for municipal officers who use the data as a simple inventory in the case of an enquiry about the location of an object within the city, or for spatial analysis in the case of a search relating to a property and the influences on it.
Future
Plans for enhancements to the City of Liege GIS which is based on Elyx, are mainly technological and include:
- Re-organization of servers for more centralized management of data
- Use of mobile mapping to identify and capture information in the field and create GIS data with minimum of manual work operations