The General Directorate of Roads, Catalan Ministry of Public Works, and Land Planning, Spain

Catalonia Creates an Enterprisewide, Open Architecture Geospatial Solution

The Challenge:

In large organizations such as the Catalan Ministry of Public Works and Land Planning, it is a challenge to have data accessible to personnel at all levels of the enterprise. The ministry is responsible for much of the transportation, urban, and land-use infrastructure in Catalonia, Spain’s easternmost region. With more than 400 public works projects currently underway in Catalonia, employees need immediate access to the most up-to-date data possible.

One of five groups within the ministry, the General Directorate of Roads (DGC), is the logistical department charged with the task of building the nucleus of an enterprisewide, open architecture geographic information system (GIS). The proposed GIS had the daunting requirements of providing both static and dynamic data representing streets, highways, railroads, and more. As an added challenge, the GIS would have to integrate data from disparate systems and different formats.

The Project Objectives:

Create an open architecture transportation GIS that will become the core of a corporate system – eventually serving the entire Catalan Ministry of Public Works and Land Planning
Integrate a wide variety of data residing in separate databases into one GIS
Make data housed in the GIS Web accessible

The Solution:

The DGC selected a geospatial solution implemented jointly by Intergraph and Intergraph Registered Solutions Provider, SYSIGSA, a consulting firm specializing in information technology as well as GIS and mapping technologies.

Intergraph’s GeoMedia technology was chosen for the DGC system to capitalize on its quality, proven open architecture, and Web-based development capabilities. The solution is being implemented in a three-phase process: creating the data model, implementing the technology, and building applications. The team considered the creation of an accurate transportation data model the most important and challenging of the three because all other data layers would be tied to it. As a result, maintaining the correct geographic relationship among data layers depends on the accuracy of the roadway data model, serving as the GIS base map.

GeoMedia technology plays an important role in assembling an accurate data model. Intergraph products are used to collect the combination of geospatial, text, and spreadsheet data files in various formats, edit them, and integrate them into the single Oracle Spatial environment.

The flexibility and openness of GeoMedia Professional enables technicians to automate much of the data capture and maintenance process in a Microsoft® Windows interface so that it takes a few months, instead of years, to populate the new enterprise database. During data viewing, this geospatial solution allows technicians to merge spatial data and generate new thematic map layers that were previously not available. For example, by integrating the descriptions of key accident sites, once only available in text format, with the digital road network maps, DGC can create an annotated thematic map showing the most dangerous intersections in Catalonia.

Most of the ministry’s employees will benefit directly from DGC’s transportation GIS; nearly all of the 400 public works projects in Catalonia affect the road network. For example, with DGC’s geospatial solution in place, transportation engineers will have immediate access to roadway information and can take this data into account when scheduling maintenance, analyzing traffic patterns, and planning new road construction.

Future Plans:

In the near future, the DGC expects 30 engineers will have desktop access to the GIS, and once LAN access is achieved, data and applications will be served out to 200 people across four regional offices. By the time GIS access is extended to the rest of the ministry and the public, thousands of users will be querying and interacting with the data simultaneously.

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