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Municipal GIS: The Abu Dhabi experience


Marcin Kunka
Head of GIS Section, abu dhabi town
planning department, uae



Marek Polak
Director of GIS Projects,
Gulf Computers, UAE



Balaji Krishnamurthy
Manager, GIS projects,
Gulf Computers, Abu Dhabi



Ali M Abou-Seif
Deputy Head of GIS Section, Planning & Surveying Sector, Abu Dhabi Municipality

GIS is a very essential part of day-to-day operations in a municipality. This paper showcases the ways in which GIS is being utilised by the Abu Dhabi Municipality in UAE to re-engineer and support all major business processes across the local government in order to increase and provide a greater return on the investment of public money

Typically, municipalities use GIS technology to manage their utilities like sewerage, water supply systems, road networks, etc. GIS is also typically used by Town Planners for preparing master plans, zoning maps and for monitoring building permits and cadastral information. An integrated GIS with data on local infrastructure can help to assess the risk to residents and buildings, and plan for protection measures or information campaigns. The potential is enormous. For municipalities, it is a combination of easy retrieval, spatial analysis and attribute presentation capabilities that makes a GIS package especially attractive to use. For many municipal functions, where attribute databases are directly related to plots, digital property maps represent a key starting point for different applications.

There are enormous benefits resulting from presentation and analyzing data with GIS across a municipality like administrative savings (no need to maintain paper maps / documents and storage facilities) and the ability to quickly and efficiently update and disseminate new information over the Internet. Many municipalities today are using this powerful technology to:

• Improve the quality of decision-making
• Facilitate information sharing among officials and with the public
• Making municipal information and transactions easily accessible via the Internet
• Make dramatic change in public presentations, reports and municipal Web sites

The main role of municipal GIS is to re-engineer and support all major business processes across the local government in order to increase their efficiency and provide a greater return on the investment of public money. This support can be divided into three general categories based upon access characteristics [1]:

• Corporate i.e. GIS applications that support multiple divisions within a municipality
• Workgroup i.e. GIS applications that support operational requirements within a specific section of the organization (e.g.: Survey Section)
• External i.e. GIS applications that are not direct municipal responsibility, but are highly interrelated (i.e. underground utility networks)