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Project of The Month November 2002
Here Aalborg Finds Its Bearings
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By Naia Bang / Texthuset Aalborg
A street map comes in handy on the Internet when you need to find your way. Still, wouldn't it be nice to view an aerial photograph of your destination – and check the positions of the parking lots? Or to view the plans of powergrid in your community? Or a cadastral map? Or the new regional plans of the municipality? Or... |
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The Active Map of Aalborg has already made a great deal of this available to the citizens of Aalborg. And even more features will follow suit during the months to come.
Geographical Information. At the first glance this does not seem attractive enough to send the citizens of Aalborg rushing to their personal computer. But Jørgen Vittrup Pedersen of COWI, project manager of the DDN Project, The Active Map of Aalborg, is convinced that it is only a matter of short time to make people realize the potentials of this home page.
- You can view your property on the Web site – on both road maps, and on cadastral maps, and you can get an aerial view of your house. You can even see what the neighbourhood looked like in the Old Days. The regional plan of the municipality will be available for viewing, and as from approx. December 1 you can view the district plan for your community. This is important information to the house owner – but also vital information to estate agents, land surveyors, lawyers, mortgage-credit institutes and others, explains Jørgen Pedersen:
- In addition, as of April next year, statistical material will be available for downloading information on the location to which you consider moving, for example the average income of your neighbourhood , the number of children attending school etc.
Already at this point, those who are moving to a new area will be able to view the number of child care centres, schools and cultural institutions, and their location in the neighbourhood.
- Up till now, no matter if you are relocating or building a new home, you would need to go to a countless range of authorities and offices – e.g. the Technical Department of the Municipality – to obtain the information required. With the Active Map of Aalborg we are composing a service packet providing all the information required from one source – no waits and idle paperwork, states Jørgen Pedersen.
Ambitious Project
From the starting point the goal of the Active Map of Aalborg has been to provide:
- More efficient municipal casework
- An enhanced service to citizens via an easier and more timesaving access to information – and
- To digitize the regional plan of the municipality in order to enhance the process of participatory democracy during the period of public comment, while saving huge volumes of paper for reports etc.
- The project is ambitious – not because we needed to develop a lot of new technology, but because we needed to make existing technologies work together. And along with that we were facing the ordeal of establishing a close cooperation between enterprises and public institutions with no history of collaboration. This is acually one of the visions of the Digital North Denmark muses Jørgen Pedersen.
Supporters and initiators of the project are the municipality of Aalborg, the Technical Department, and Informi GIS, their supplier of geographical information systems, the SAS Institute, a statistics consulting company and supplier of software – and last, not least, COWI, one of the largest engineering companies holding experience in both geographical information and project management.
Some of the companies that are now cooperating in the Active Map of Aalborg project could be competitors in other projects.
- This is very interesting as we are now expected to share knowledge and experience – not to hide it. And this is one of the main concepts of the Digital North Denmark, points out Jørgen Pedersen.
Monitor the Regional Plan of the Municipality
In late November the first two of a series of revisons to the municipal planning will be published. These are for the local areas of Nørresundby and Svenstrup. And - for the first time in Danish history - the publication will issued in digital form on the Web site www.detaktiveaalborgkort.dk allowing citizens unlimited access to all the map and information material required.
- The Web site is freeing up a great deal of the paperwork – both for the internal commenting currently performed in the administrations – and in relation to the civic public. The civic public will have a lot more information available - and for download in the home whenever there is time to look into it points out Jørgen Pedersen.
He is not hiding that kissing all the paperwork goodbye and plunging into computerised publication requires certain adjustments from administrations as well as citizens. Still, he is convinced that benefits will exceed the hassle of adjustment by far.
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- A service pack is user information – on the terms of the citizens. This sounds all logic, but in fact it is thought-provoking that so many public authorities in this country are structuring information on their Web sites according to the structure of their institution – and not according to the common sense logic used by the public in finding the information, points out Jørgen Pedersen, project manager of the Active Map of Aalborg.
Photo: Jesper Dall. |
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Get Statistical Information
The next great step for the Active Map of Aalborg is to combine statistical information material – from the municipality as well as from the Statistics Denmark – with the map material on the Web site. And here the potential of the Web site becomes infinite: Enterprises will be enabled to locate the labourforce required. A newcomer can find the average total income of a family compared to the location he is leaving. Or the average age of inhabitants in the quarter. Or…
But first and foremost students of tertiary educations will benefit from the new service. And hence the staff of the Technical Department .
- Just consider how often local administrations are contacted by students in urgent need of statistics relating to a project. The student must wait for the material requested, and to the municipality it entails huge volumes of paper - and a corresponding workload. Once the statistical material is made available on the Web site, it will be easy for the students to retrieve the information when required and needed – which will be of a very saving effect on the resources of the municipality, states Jørgen Pedersen, and - he adds:
- To my knowledge it is quite unique in Denmark to combine statistic information databases with GIS, short for Geographic Information Systems.
Shutting Down Their Own Office
Originally the commitment of the project was the idea of building an independent, solitary GIS-portal.
- But six months gone in the project period we realized that this was a wrong approach. Of course the Active Map of Aalborg should be an integrated part of the information portal of the municipality of Aalborg. So the goal of the project is now to let the Active Map of Aalborg exist only for the lifetime of the project – which is till the end of next year – upon which the services and the technology enabling the www.detaktiveaalborgkort.dk, becomes an integrated component of the www.aalborg.dk - the Web page of the Municipality of Aalborg. So one could claim that the goal is to shut down our own office, states Jørgen Pedersen.
View the Active Map of Aalborg on www.detaktiveaalborgkort.dk, or read more about the project on www.thedigitalnorthdenmark.com.
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Could you tell where this aerial photo was taken? Well, actually it is more difficult than that to identify locations you know when suddenly viewed from an usual angle. A bird's eye's view. This is the Tivoliland theme |
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