The Aguazul Geographic Information System (GIS) is a tool used by the municipal administration in order to facilitate the query,analysis and visualization of geospatial data related with the land use, health, agriculture, cadastre, economy, environment, etc. This project becomes a key element to promote the democratization of access to public information in local agencies.

Citizens and officials are allowed to have access to geographic information using a simple and user friendly application accesible from any kind of web browser.

Context

Aguazul (Casanare, Colombia) is a small town (1.330 km² or 513.52 mi²) which has a population of 69.335 and is 224.31 miles away from the Colombia’s capital, Bogotá D.C.

Aguazul is recognized by its production of rice and oil, being the town that receives the most amount of oil royalties nationwide. Due to the Oil boom in 90’s that has also brought insecurity and violence to the highest levels. However, recent governors with the intervention of the Colombian army and police, have returned the security to the town

As usual in remote towns all over the world, even though there are lots of data, its management is not efficient due to issues such as limited IT infrastructure, unqualified staff and high costs of GIS software.

The solution

Thanks to the cloud services of the CartoDB platform, it was possible to create a customized, web based and cost-effective solution that allows interactive queries to the geospatial information through a web browser.

The CartoDB platform allows the storage, management, analysis and vizualization of georeferenced data through programming interfaces such as CartoDB.js, Import API, Maps API y SQL API. This platform can be integrated with other tools like NodeJS, AngularJS, Elasticsearch to create custom functionalities such as access control, full text search, document management, sharing maps, etc.

Besides, the application provides offline geographic data editing through a custom version of a QGIS plugin “QgisCartoDB” which was created for this project and has been released for the community

Conclusions and future plans

The Aguazul GIS supports the Municipal Management by providing a better comprehension of the territory with collection, standardization, analysis and visualization or geographic data. CartoDB’s scalability and flexibility make possible the project development in an efficient way both technically and economically.

In the future the town plans to keep expanding the solution by including new functionalities and data which can generate complementary analysis that would support decision-making at Mayor’s office as well as to the general public.

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