The City of Cape Town has won a Special Achievement in GIS award for its outstanding use of the Geographic Information System (GIS) ISIS.
Awarded by the Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) at the 2013 ESRI International User Conference in San Diego, USA, in July 2013, the Special Achievement in GIS Award recognises the technology that helps the City better manage a wide range of property-related business processes.
“This is a significant achievement for the City of Cape Town, proving that not only do we employ some of the brightest minds in the GIS industry, but that, by developing smart technologies such as this, we demonstrate our commitment to creating an efficient and enabling environment which benefits both our residents and the City,” says the City’s Mayoral Committee Member for Corporate Services, Alderman Demetri Qually.
The City’s Integrated Spatial Information System (ISIS) stood out from more than 100 000 other projects submitted by GIS specialists around the globe.
ISIS is a world-class Integrated Property Information System that provides a single view of properties, both spatial and financial. By combining these views, it increases accuracy, reduces red tape and speeds up these processes, saving the City and ratepayers time and money. ISIS includes:
- a property value chain: Previously, separate systems were used to capture, store, maintain and manage property-related information. This resulted in incomplete information, data inconsistency, delays in capturing and making data available, and delayed handovers between departments. ISIS offers one single view of a property (both financially and spatially) with all its attributes (for example ownership) which is accessible by City staff. Updates are now synchronised, improving co-ordination between City departments such as Valuations, Revenue, Planning and Building Development Management, Property Management and Human Settlements as well as the Deeds Office, Surveyor General and conveyance attorneys
- a Geographic Information System: Through the integration of the transaction system with the GIS, all of the City’s transactions related to properties are also geographically displayed, making it possible to do spatial analyses of transactions, which will enhance analysis of trends. In a later phase of the project, a web portal will also be created to serve information to the public
- C3 Notification ISIS Viewer: The C3 Notification ISIS Viewer allows users to zoom in to a specific geographic area and view all service delivery notifications which are reported to the City via the Customer Relations Call Centre. This allows the City to more accurately prioritise service delivery resources and target infrastructure maintenance
The single spatial and financial view of properties, which is provided by the ISIS system, is a major step forward in ensuring that Cape Town is a smart City and has now been recognised internationally.
In nominating the City of Cape Town for the award, ESRI noted: “The City of Cape Town has been using ESRI technology for that last 20 years for planning and visualisation purposes. In 2008, they embarked on a project to consolidate all their property data into a single geo-enabled ERP System. This project is known as the ISIS project.
“As part of the project, property data from various departments was consolidated into the Land Use Management (LUM) module of SAP with GIS as one of the main feeder systems for property data. SAP LUM brings together all the aspects of property and ownership. The ESRI GIS system was used to store the spatial aspects of the properties. Both systems were integrated using message-based integration using a mediator pattern. In this way, both the spatial and ERP data is kept in a single integrated logical database. Properties are captured in the GIS first before they are sent on to the LUM system to ensure that all properties have a spatial representation.
“Data is made available to City staff via a SAP Graphical User Interface with an integrated web-mapping application for search and visualisation.”
