ON-LINE GIS SERVICES: SUCCESS ACHIEVED THROUGH PARTNERSHIP

Oussama C. Jadayel1, Nada Khorchid2, Fares Nassif3 and Rita Ibrahim4

ABSTRACT

The importance of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) technologies cannot be over- emphasized in modern-day, post-war . However, implementation of these novel and very powerful tools within the country civil service has been rather slow. As a result, the Lebanese public sector has not been able to harness this technology and reap its benefits. The reasons behind this set-back have been many and diversified. To begin with, initial investments in GI-systems are relatively high. There is also the pre-requisite of adequately trained and skilled staff who must be conversant with such systems. These hurdles have been very frustrating to systems suppliers, developers, and academics who collectively are highly skilled and keen to see such novel applications penetrate the market. Engineering departments have been particularly affected since this has prevented them from advancing their GIS teaching or research programs and directing their graduates to the local job markets. To break the dead-lock, a unique model has been pioneered by three partners: Engineering Faculty, ArabiaGIS and Amioun Municipality. The latter two represent the private industrial and public sectors respectively. The three parties joined forces in order to put in place a fully functional web-based system offering electronic local authority services to the public. These services ranged from tax payments to tourist information to property and business advertising to utility networks as well as many more. In realizing the pilot system, each party has contributed its know-how, its contacts and its full potential. Consequently, each has achieved its institutional objective: Amioun has become more efficient in its government, ArabiaGIS has achieved an integrated system which it can advertise, and Balamand University has trained its students on a real project and given them added value for their education.

KEYWORDS

GIS, Partnership, Local Authorities, Student Training, Lebanon, On-Line

1-INTRODUCTION

The Lebanese public sector has been very appreciative of the potentials of geographical information systems and has been monitoring their developments with extreme interest. Several ministries and public service companies have found in them the long awaited tools

1 Associate Professor, Director GIS Center, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Balamand, P.O.Box: 100, , Lebanon. Email: [email protected] 2 ArabiaGISChief Operation Officer, Gefinor Bloc E, 1st Floor, P.O.Box: 13-5302, Lebanon. Email: [email protected] 3 President, Amioun Municipality,P.O.Box: 6, Amioun, Al-Koura, Lebanon. Email: [email protected] 4 GIS Center Supervisor, University of Balamand, P.o.Box: 100, Tripoli, Lebanon. Email: [email protected]

1 necessary to develop their services to more competitive levels. The Ministry of Environment for example has invested in a system which it uses to evaluate and assess the levels of environmental stress at various regions of the country according to some very specific set of indicators (ECOEDIT Liban, 2001). On the other hand, the Lebanese postal service, as well as a regional electricity board (Electricte de Zahle) have also pioneered the use of these systems as early as the mid-nineties (Nakad, 2000 and Kabbara, 2001).

However, the penetration of these systems into other areas and levels of government, especially the local authorities, has been very slow. The major reasons behind this set back are really economic in nature. The relatively high initial investment in software, hardware and data needed for development, as well as the need to recruit or train staff capable to operate, manage and maintain such highly sophisticated systems have been really prohibitive to local authorities operating on very tight budgets.

Lebanese universities on the other hand are keen to ensure that their graduates are trained to the highest of standards and are kept in direct contact with industrial and governmental sectors in order to enhance their professional profiles and improve their employability. This has so far proved difficult without a unifying and cost effective activity or project.

The object of this paper is to report the results of a successful partnership whereby the academic, the public and the private sectors joined forces, perhaps for the first time, to realize a novel pilot project with very minimal monetary resource. The synergy achieved by their union exceeded by far the sum total of their individual contributions and allowed each to better achieve its institutional mission.

2-THE CONSORTIUM

In this section, the consortium made up from the University of Balamand Engineering Faculty, Amioun Municipality as well as ArabiaGIS will be presented. The special elements of each partner, which enabled the realization of the final project objectives, will also be highlighted.

2.1 The University of Balamand and its GIS Center

The University of Balamand is a non-profit institution for higher education, established in 1988 on the historical Balamand hill at seventy five kilometers to the north of the Lebanese capital Beirut. Over the years, the University has grown to incorporate a total of nine faculties including Arts and Social Sciences, Engineering, Sciences, Health Sciences, Medicine, Medical Specialties, Business and Management, Theology, and Fine Arts (Acdemie Libanaise des Baux Arts:ALBA). The University has chosen for itself a mission which reflects Lebanese national priorities: In addition to promoting excellence in teaching and research, it seeks to instill cross-cultural dialogue, build student capacities to meet national aspirations, as well as protect the Lebanese environment and sustain its resources. To fulfill its objectives, Balamand has developed a number of protocols with establishments from both the governmental and non-governmental sectors and instigated a number of programs, both curricular and extra- curricular, through which it can engage its faculty, staff and students in active interaction with its community. One such program is a community service based activity, Service Experience: Education through Doing-SEED (SEED Web-Site, 2000), in which students can use their skills, gain professional experience and get academic credit for work they do for developing their government, local authority or non-governmental organization.

2 The Geographical Information Systems Center (GISC) at the University of Balamand Engineering Faculty was established in 1999 as a facility intended to advance knowledge in modern-day geographical technologies. From the start, the activities of the center quickly attracted the attention of the University community as well as that of the external local agencies, particularly the local authorities around the University who collectively saw the potentials of GIS in improving the quality of life on the local and the national levels. Consequently, on the one hand the center was approached by community partners eager to develop and implement such technologies, and on the other, many students who were keen to develop skills in this modern field. The result was a very rapid growth of the GIS culture at Balamand thus rendering the Center a hub for excellence not only in the north but also in the country as a whole.

Such a standing was achieved through a stringent strategy in which a well defined hierarchy was coupled with a dedicated human element and sophisticated equipment to realize a clear mission: “Developing GIS knowledge inline with national requirements”. As such, students were voluntarily brought in to man the Center and to work with faculty members and technical supervisors on real practical projects. Those students fed into the Center through the many University schemes which enabled them to do so. Many of them were to work for their graduation projects while others were community service students who were supposed to work on community partner projects or graduates who wanted to further their qualifications through the continuing education program, etc. The Center is now a forum in which students of different backgrounds and experiences interact and exchange ideas and know-how. It is now the norm where experienced students train the less experienced and work together towards a common goal: computerizing maps of places where they grew up and live.

Figure 1. Students at the Balamand GIS Center

2.2 ArabiaGIS

ArabiaGIS is a company owned and managed by Khatib & Alami Consolidated Engineering Company (K&ACEC) and Automation & Computer Technologies (ACT) for the purpose of e-mapping commerce. It aims at commercializing the Geographic Information System by providing a wide range of products and services for Consumers, Businesses, Professionals, and Intellectuals. The company offers a unique combination with extensive expertise and professionalism in GIS Enterprise Solutions, Turn Key Solutions, Consulting Services, Hosting Infrastructures, and Spatially Enabled Electronic Mapping/Commerce Solutions.

3 ArabiaGIS is offering several online GIS services utilizing state-of-the-art technologies such as Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server, MS SQL 2000 Server, ESRI’s ArcIMS & ArcSDE with the ability to port solutions to any platform. All these services are provided via an ASP model with the Internet used as a delivery channel.

ArabiaGIS has been in need of a real pilot project to demonstrate its advanced professional capabilities in providing on-line GIS solutions to the local and regional markets. It has also been very keen to identify and foster the emerging talent from local institutions. As such, its partnership with Amioun and Balamand is considered as strategic necessity for the company.

2.3 Amioun Municipality

Amioun is a northern Lebanese town situated at the heart of the region of El-Koura. Since the Ottoman times, Amioun has been the administrative capital of the caza5 and a central focus for trade, commerce and service in the region. It also shares with the caza its main characteristics: a moderate climate, abundant waters and rich soils for which the tree is the main agricultural resource.

The town is home to some twelve thousand registered residents nearly half of whom are immigrants in other parts of Lebanon or abroad. Many of these immigrants, however, still maintain very strong links with their hometown and return to it regularly.

The Municipality of Amioun is a very dynamic local authority system, highly committed to the sustainable development of its area of governance and to its region. It has established very strong links with development organizations and foreign commissions by successfully completing a good number of ambitious projects at the community, environmental and cultural levels in partnership with these agencies. It has also been the main force behind linking its community with academia and played a major role in instigating a “Memorandum of Understanding” between the conglomeration of El-Koura Municipalities6 and their local University, Balamand, in order to benefit from the knowledge and skills of academics in advancing the region. The present GIS project has been a major ambition for the Municipality which has been very keen to see it to fruition.

3-METHODOLGY AND WORKFLOW

The workflow contemplated for achieving the on-line GIS comprised a sequence of steps from each one of the partners. Those steps were classified under two main headings: GIS preparation and web preparation. As far as the former was concerned the Balamand GISC and Amioun collaborated to produce a robust geographical information system capable of reflecting the true face of modern day town. These steps included:

x Data acquisition, classification and organization x Data input x Quality control x Updating

5 An administrative region in Lebanon comprising a city and/or a number of towns and villages. There are twenty six casas in Lebanon. 6 Thirty municipalities in total.

4 All the data available at Amioun municipality was made available for the purposes of the project. The starting point was the acquisition of all the official cadastral information and town paper maps. Those totaled a sum of 33 and included 6218 parcels. Balamand students had the task of registering those maps in their actual locations on the surface of the earth as well as digitizing each parcel. Figure 2 shows the net result of the exercise which enabled the connectivity and orientation of each map with respect to the other to be known and to assess straight away to which map a particular parcel belongs. Students also worked to digitize the street and road networks and came up with a coding system for them which depended on the level of use of each.

Figure 2. To the left is the result of the paper map registration process. The boundaries of each map are shown. To the right is a magnified portion showing some digitized parcels with some road centerlines.

Following this, the geological details of the soil and the rest of the infrastructure in terms of waterways, water, telephone and power networks were included. The student team also worked on including the cultural details of the town such as historical sites, places of worship, land marks, schools, government offices, hospitals, banks, restaurants, etc. A satellite image with 80 cm accuracy was also incorporated and this allowed the land use to be known. The net result was an integrated and comprehensive GIS which was transferred to the municipality to better effect its government.

Figure 3. To the left is a screen shot of the town of Amioun showing parcels and cadastral zones. To the right is a magnified portion showing some digitized parcels and some roads overlaid on top of a satellite image. It is clear how the land use could be directly assessed.

5 In the next phase, the web preparation phase, the GIS was transferred in its entirety to ArabiaGIS where it was operated upon to render it suitable for web viewing, querying and analysis. Five levels of geo-descriptive data were presented:

x a general map x a property map x a tourist map x a tax account map x a property for sale map

The general map portrays some broad information of the town such as the neighboring villages, geology, zoning, roads and waterways. The property map allows getting information about a particular piece of land in terms of location, orientation proximity to facilities as well as any relevant legal or administrative details pertaining to it. The tourist map allows a quick view of the important the information a tourist planning to visit the town may be interested in. The tax account map is a password-protected facility which allows any resident of Amioun to access all tax details relevant to his/her residence or land. The last is a property for sale map on which advertisers can post details of their land, pricing as well as contact information. In addition, the integrated system includes all the necessary facilities for a web-based GIS such as viewing, zooming, panning, querying, buffering and many more.

Figure 4. Two screen shots showing the Tourist map (left) and the property for sale map on- line GIS.

4-THE ON-LINE GIS-POSSIBLE APPLICATIONS

The integrated GIS may be accessed by choosing the GIS SERVICES link on the Amioun web-site at www.amioun.org. It is available, free of charge, to any web-surfer requiring information on the town. The system is intended to be a “one stop point” from which different types of information may be acquired quickly and efficiently. Tourist, economic, technical, as well as service related data can easily be analyzed either individually, or correlated with relative ease to allow sound and accurate decisions to be made regarding numerous scenarios of engineering, investment, development, environmental and entrepreneurial nature. In this section, a typical application is given in order to illustrate the powers and potentials of the system.

6 Feasibility Study for the Construction of a Residential Home in Amioun: The on-line GIS allows fast and effective selection of a suitable site for building, say, a family house in the town. A parcel can be analyzed from the view point of size, location, elevation, price, proximity to amenities, geology, current use, institutional and legal aspects in a very short span of time. The acquisition of such data by conventional means from governmental offices would usually require weeks rather than days, not to mention the additional time required for analysis. Such time saving could very easily be translated into a monetary equivalent reflected on the engineer, developer and client.

5-CONCLUSIONS AND FURTHER WORK

The work described in this paper is the result of a rare partnership between the academic, public and private sectors. University students who are keen to use their skills and gain new ones have been the key factor in achieving the set objectives and in making Amioun on-line GIS a reality. Their contribution has been instrumental in removing an important barrier, the economic, hindering the implementation of the technology at the local authority level. While doing so, they have acquired a new level in their professional training, namely, having to work to strict industrial and governmental standards. Their achievements have given them great credibility with prospective employers.

The working model pioneered by Balamand, ArabiaGIS and Amioun Municipality, is now an example to be followed in the country and is being pushed by all three partners towards new research and development frontiers. The consortium is also working towards expanding the experience and sharing it with institutions and establishments so as maximum joint benefit could be reaped.

References

Amioun Website www.amioun.org

SEED Website www.balamand.edu.lb/SEED/seed.html

ECOEDIT Liban State of the Environment Report 2001, in collaboration with the Ministry of Environment and the Lebanese Environment and Development Observatory, Published by the Lebanese Ministry of Environment 2001.

Kabbara, Fawzi Electricite de Zahle Plugs in Its GIS, ARC NEWS, Vol. 23 No.2, ESRI, Summer 2001.

Nakad, Assaad Powering-up in Zahle, GEOEurope, Issue 9, 10th October 2000. http://www.geoplace.com

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