Most municipalities believe that a crucial element in their business is the quality, security and integrity of their data and that a top priority lies in securing its consistency and accessibility. A recent countrywide road show by spatial solution provider MunSys Technologies revealed some interesting feedback from local government regarding its requirements for data capture and management. Following international trends, much comment centred on the move away from old style proprietary systems towards truly open platforms for spatial data management.

Major investment is in the data

"Typically, the major investment that any organisation makes is in its data, not in systems, hardware or training and this is especially true for municipalities with their vast amounts of critical data," says MunSys Technologies' Managing Director, Chris Tolken. "Using an open platform is one way to secure this investment. If you have several proprietary systems or various sources of data that do not talk to each other, you will spend about 70% of your time moving data between the different systems. This is unproductive and costly. With an open system you save an enormous amount of time because data is fully accessible across the whole enterprise. Furthermore, other open systems can interface with the main system without communication problems and the assurance that data will be freely available."

Moving to an open platform is not as problematic as it might sound. MunSys Technologies is one of few local companies with the specialised spatial data base skills to guide the client through the technology maze step by step. Says Tolken, "When assisting clients to make the change, we do not just take the data from its old proprietary database and reload it in the new one. We check that it conforms to the municipality's business rules and if it does not we correct it before importing it. This way, all data complies with the municipality standards and a fully optimised database is established right from the start."

This is very different to the traditional GIS approach where the user must make sure that he is implementing the municipal business practices correctly as he loads the data. "For example," continues Tolken, "using a traditional system, a town planner would have to implement the town planning rules on the system himself in order to create an accurate, workable database. However, the problem with this is that if you have 200 town planners, in 200 different town councils, you will have 200 different databases."

Multiple applications - one database

Another advantage of using an open system is that applications from other vendors can be used as long as they also comply with the open standard. The big advantage here being that all the different applications can then share the common database. The standards used in MunSys are based on the recommendations by the International OpenGIS Consortium with regards storing spatial data in a database.

MunSys is an enterprise software solution specifically designed for local government spatial applications. Developed using industry standard Oracle and Autodesk technologies, it comprises six fully integrated packages covering the full spectrum of municipal requirements. All the applications share a common database, are extremely user friendly and reduce support and training requirements.

MunSys Technologies

(011) 781 1224

slilford@munsys.co.za

www.munsys.co.za