Let’s change the way we

handle our cities

Geographic Geographic Geographic Geographic Geographic

GIS?

When you were in school, you might have wondered “how on earth is geography ever going to help me in life?” Here’s how. The Geographic Information System (GIS) is an amazing technology that is revolutionizing the way we look at our countries, our cities, our work and our lives. GIS is the technical term for digital mapping. Whether you want to locate all the cafés in your area or all the malls in your city, GIS comes to your rescue. It allows you to locate geographic features, analyze geographic patterns, create travel directions, measure distance, and plenty more.

GIS uses computers to store, interpret and display a vast variety of data identified by location. But it’s much more than just maps and visuals. A GIS database contains layers of information. These layers are combined into different visual models that facilitate policy makers and authorities to recognize opportunities, pinpoint problem areas quickly, allow for common information sharing, and reduce cost and processing time significantly which in turn even generates revenue.

What a

Smart City!

Inclusive. Technologically advanced. Wired. Connected. Apps. G-governance. “Smart” discussions are loaded with jargon such as these. But what is it that really defines a smart city? Think about how your smart phone makes communication easy and efficient for you. Similarly, a smart city is all about improving basic service delivery and commodity provision for all citizens within its constraints. Working in tandem with technology towards a common goal of ameliorating the quality of life, a smart city is the smart way out.

Technology makes our functions smoother and life easier. According to the Government of India’s Smart Cities Mission, the purpose of having a smart city is “to drive economic growth and improve the quality of life of people by enabling local area development and harnessing technology, especially technology that leads to Smart outcomes.” A smart city will improve infrastructure and services. A smart city will lead to employment generation. A smart city will expedite overall growth by finding opportunities and creating structure within chaos.

CITYLAYERS Just about what you need to

Make a city smart

So how do we make our cities smart? We have the savoir-faire of GIS. What is the next step? Nascent Info Technologies’ answer to this query was in the form of CityLayers, a suite of applications that leverage GIS technology to search, view, discover, edit and manage the metadata catalogue of all assets within a city in a spatial format. It comprises of a Departmental Geoportal, Citizens’ Portal, a mobile Survey App, and a CityLayers built-in connector for QGIS. All of these cater to the requirements of multiple departments within Municipal Corporations of various cities across Gujarat.

DATA MUCH?
Dealing with large volumes of varied information is cumbersome and time consuming for city authorities. The problem is further compounded in a smart city with volumes of information generated by hundreds of thousands of devices. However, CityLayers is equipped just with the right tech to handle such challenges. Using DSS, it transforms geospatial data from its existing format into a user-friendly, digitized version whose heightened visual experience promotes fast, efficient and informed decisions.  CityLayers provides quick access to spatial data, visualization and analytical capabilities over a web browser.

G LEAVES E BEHIND
India is steadily improving upon its administration systems through the implementation of e-governance. However, the new buzz word in the world of governments is g-governance where ‘g’ stands for geo. Municipal corporations across the state have employed CityLayers in order to supplement their e-governance and radicalize city maintenance. At the click of a button, the CityLayers Departmental Geoportal can conjure up a bird’s eye view of the city and its resources. This enables officials to recognize opportunities for growth and expansion, to deploy effective measures for upkeep of city assets, and take faster and more informed decisions.

ALL FOR ONE, ONE FOR ALL
If the government is ‘of, by and for’ the people, where is the citizens’ say in g-governance? Well, CityLayers has made provisions for said concern. The CityLayers Citizen Portal is a web-based application whose main objective is to bring the citizens closer to digital maps for understanding their location, nearby facilities and surrounding areas, so that they are better placed to make location-specific decisions. The portal also aids Municipal Departments to offer prompt responses to citizens’ grievances and effect efficient and timely measures in order to counteract emergencies.

We are open about it…

CityLayers is brought to life with some very state-of-the-art technologies: it is an OCG-compliant, unrestricted software based on 4 core Open Source technologies - PostgreSQL along-with PostGIS, GeoServer and OpenLayers. This is in alignment with the guidelines prescribed by the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology in the promotion and use of open source software. This makes CityLayers a highly cost-effective solution since the corporations can avoid upfront and annual tech support charges, eventually reducing total Cost of Ownership by a whopping 90 percent.

If it is smart, it should be user-friendly…

True enough, the CityLayers suite is extremely user-friendly. It allows the customer complete freedom from hardware, user, plug-in, version, product-based licensing, to name a few. A built-in QGIS connector in the CityLayers suite allows unlimited users across all departments to edit and validate spatial data, located on the central database against LDAP authentication based on their respective rights and privileges. CityLayers also offers the Common Operational Picture, which allows for collaborative planning and combined execution of upgradation, upload and collation of all digital data.