Belgian Institute for Postal Services and Telecommunications (BIPT), Belgium

Belgian Institute for Postal Services and Telecommunications Provides Public Access Using GeoMedia Technology

The Challenge:

As the Belgian regulatory body for postal services and telecommunications, the Belgian Institute for Postal Services and Telecommunications (BIPT) provides a pivotal service. According to the Royal Decree of the 10th of August 2005, communication antennas must abide by radiation thresholds for electromagnetic waves for frequencies between 10 MHz and

10 GHz. In addition, operators have an obligation to share both the location of communication antennas as well as radiation reports with the general public.

Previously, when other administrations wanted to know the location of communication antennas within their territory, the BIPT had to query the database and export the results as an Excel spreadsheet. Analysis reports for the electromagnetic radiation then had to be added to the spreadsheet, and everything was then sent via e-mail or in hard copy. As one can imagine, this became a very time-consuming and daunting task.

The BIPT sought to implement a Web-based system that would enable the general public to access both the location sites of communication antennas in any given territory along with the corresponding radiation reports for antennas within the area.

The Project Objectives:

Provide quick and easy online access to communication antennae information and radiation reports
Improve business processes
Reduce work hours spent answering communication antenna inquiries

The Solution:

The BIPT selected Intergraph to deliver an online information system (www.sites.bipt.be) to enable the general public to access communication antenna data and radiation reports in a user-friendly environment. Intergraph’s GeoMedia suite of products offered the ideal solution. GeoMedia and GeoMedia

WebMap were used to manage approximately 7,000 individual data records and GeoMedia WebMap Publisher to publish data to the Internet – without customization and programming. Intergraph technology was also selected for its open architecture, ease of use during implementation, and ability to further expand the system in the future.

According to Peter Van Huffel, Engineer, BIPT, “The new Web-based system has been of tremendous benefit to our organization with regard to reducing the manual labor involved in answering queries. The public can now simply access the user-friendly online system and search for communication antennas using a number of different criteria, such as searching by municipality, street name, or postal code. The system was remarkably easy to implement, requiring no customization. After installation of the Web server, data, and GeoMedia WebMap Publisher, we had the site up and running in less than a day.”

Future plans:

The BIPT plans to revise and improve its corporate Web site to include the new Web-based system, while still maintaining the separate domain address, enabling users to access the information from multiple locations.

Future plans also include the augmentation of possibilities for making queries within the system. Additional functionalities of GeoMedia WebMap Publisher will be incorporated, including better zoom in/zoom out capability. The process of updating the data will eventually be automated. As it exists now, the data resides in Access databases. These databases will be replaced by SQL server connections, in which new data will be generated on a daily basis.

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