GET successfully completed another project in the field of Local Government and more specifically in the Municipality of Papagou – Cholargou, which being our long-term customer, has acquired a complete spatial data infrastructure based on open-source technology.

The infrastructure hosts a large number of geospatial data and serves the operations of the Municipality at the operational level. Given the positive response of internal users (executives of the Municipality), the proven time savings in the documentation of the existing urban planning, but also of external users (e.g., Building services, engineers who demonstrate the operation on site visits, citizens) the Municipality of Papagou – Cholargou systematically invests in the expansion of the operational possibilities of the system.

An important part of the services provided by the Municipality are providing information to the public, the provision of data and making decisions on issues that require knowledge of the urban status and the current situation. The Technical Service is called on a daily basis to respond to requests from citizens and professionals, other services of the Municipality, central government, but also to plan the development of the urban fabric, considering the current situation and the ever-changing institutional framework.

In order to cope with these responsibilities and to make it possible in practice to improve its administrative capacity, the Municipality of Papagou – Cholargou set the following priorities:

• • the digital archiving of urban legislation and the transition to digital management
  • the digital mapping of the Municipality
  • the adoption of GIS technologies
  • the development of value-added electronic services
  • coordinating and improving internal service procedures

Under this scope, a state-of-the- art geoinformation system was developed with the object of managing and disseminating the available digital geospatial information, with special emphasis on urban data. The implementation of the system is based solely on the use of open-source software, achieving huge savings and economies of scale, as the cost of acquiring and upgrading software licenses is zero.

It is an integrated system for managing and distributing maps via web services. The system serves the internal needs of the Services of the Municipality, but aims mainly at serving the public (citizens, engineers, professionals, agencies) and the democratization of access to information.

The users can interact with the system through a web mapping application. Both access and use of the system are very simple. With a single “click” anywhere in the space, the interested party retrieves a wealth of information regarding:

• • Urban planning status (Road Planning – City Plan, Building Conditions, Land Uses, Diagrams, etc.)
  • Infrastructure
  • Photographic documentation with panoramic images (360^o) of the road network for the year 2020
  • Points of interest
  • Environment
  • Reference Maps

 In the scope of this project, given the maturity of the system and the transfer of know-how to the internal users of the system, big data was collected, processed and visualized, fast and economically, and the digital reference map along the Municipality’s road network was created Then, with the appropriate processing, the captured information was converted into actionable knowledge through the implementation of two useful tools for the Services of the Municipality.

The first is the Digital Registry of Georeferenced Road Signs, which was created by processing 360^o panoramic images along the road network and identifying and geocoding vertical signs. The result of the editing process was the creation of the digital registry of geo-referenced vertical marking plates which numbers over 4,000 objects. It was found that, out of the total number of plates, about 200 were not legible (existence of a sticker, etc.) and an autopsy should be performed to restore and complete the system.

The second is the Field Recording Application for Mobile Devices used for documenting the wells in the area of the Municipality and to record the cases that need intervention, due to damage either to the grilles or to the openings. Each well that was recorded as problematic is accompanied by the appropriate photographic documentation.

For each well the information recorded includes:

• • Number of grilles / openings
  • Whether intervention is required or not
  • Comments
  • Photo
  • Timestamp

This material is a useful tool of the Technical Service for the management of the infrastructure of the Municipality and the extraction of information from the analysis of the log data (eg number of grilles per number of grilles and per number of openings, number of grilles that need intervention, per OT etc. a.).