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Digim.GZ -- The Digital Municipality of Guangzhou ProjectDr. Pu CHENG Bureau of Civic Engineering and Gardening of Guangzhou Municipality 348 Huanshidonglu Road Guangzhou, 510060, China chengpu@gzszyl.gov.cn Ms. Jie RAO Bureau of Civic Engineering and Gardening of Guangzhou Municipality 348 Huanshidonglu Road Guangzhou, 510060, China raojie@gzszyl.gov.cn Fax: +86 -20-8725-6796 Abstract During the last two decades of rapid economic growth, Guangzhou, as the principal city in south China, has experienced dramatic growth, both in its popular and urban scale. However, such an unprecedented, and somehow under-regulated, urban expansion has already caused a number of problems, some of which has constrained the city’s civic functions and undermined its competitiveness. The Guangzhou authority has decided that the city’s future development should be subject to a more comprehensive, scientific and regulated planning and management strategy. To fulfil this requirement, the authority has initiated the Digital Municipality of Guangzhou (DigiM.GZ) project. The project aims to represent the Guangzhou metropolitan area as a digitalized virtual municipality by using a wide range of up-to-date GIS and telecommunications technologies. The project will play a key role in facilitating the future planning and management of the city. The long-term objectives of the project are to optimize the city’s function and operation, and more critically, secure a long-term economically and environmentally sustainable urban development. INTRODUCTION Guangzhou is the capital city of China’s southern coastal province of Guangdong. It has a recorded history of more than 2,200 years and it has been an important trading seaport for 15 centuries. Thanks to decades of economic boom, Guangzhou has strengthened its role as the political, cultural, economic and transport centre of southeast China. The city has experienced rapid urbanization. Today the Guangzhou municipality expands to an area of 7,434 square kilometres with a population exceeding ten millions. In the past few years, tens of billions infrastructure projects have been built to support social and economic development of Guangzhou. However the old management system is no longer competent for running the city due to the lack of coordination between government departments, their old technologies and structures, and the obstacle in information exchange. Having realised the challenges, the Guangzhou municipality authority plans to modernise not only the infrastructure hardware but also the management software of the city.  Figure 1 Guangzhou, China In 2004, Guangzhou government proposed an ambitious project to construct the so-called “Digital Metropolis of Guangzhou (DigiM-GZ)”. By using the state-of-the-art computing and information technologies, this information system will provide a universal platform to deal with all digital data relevant to the city planning, management and maintenance, including water, gas and power supply, transport network, drainage and telecommunications. By sharing the data, this system aims to facilitate the government to manage the city effectively and efficiently, support sound coordination among various civic service sectors and provide information for the public. According to the plan, the DigiM-GZ project will upgrade the city government into the 21st century within the next 10 years. 1 Digital Metropolis of Guangzhou (DigiM-GZ) 1.1 Challenges China hasn’t built such an urban information system before. There are a number of technical and management challenges for the DigiM-GZ project. Firstly, the system will use advanced technologies and state-of-the-art computing and communication equipments to cope with large amounts of data and various tasks. However an over-complicated system will require immense investment, increase maintenance cost, and even compromise the robustness of the whole system. Thus, the key is to design a scalable system, such that the system can initially be designed to have a moderate size and limited functions and later it can be smoothly updated and extended to accommodate future requirements and adopt new technologies. Secondly, the civic services are managed by independent administrations. Information data collected by the different government sectors are stored in very different formats and the data are far from complete. Thus a challenge of the project is to construct a so-called Universal Urban Multi-Info System (UUMIS), which is a Geographical Information System (GIS) that integrates heterogeneous information data from various sources. Thirdly, civic services are carried out by a number of government sectors, which work independently and have formed their own systems and routines. The DigiM-GZ project is to coordinate all government activities related to the urban planning, administration and maintenance. The project will trigger a series of reforms to restructure the government departments and reorganise the practice of civic services. 1.2 Sub-Systems of DigiM-GZ The DigiM-GZ project consists of various sub-systems.
Setting up the UUMIS is the most critical task of the DigiM-GZ project, because it is the information basis of the project. The UUMIS is designed to a high standard such that the system is flexible and extendable whereas the information data are safe, reliable and easy to access. The DigiM-GZ project will deal with various types of information data that are collected by different organisations. It is vital to setup a universal standard on data structure, which is independent from any computer software or operation system, such that information data can be smoothly extended and modified for future applications. Advanced database technology will be used to construct a universal platform to import, store and process datasets in order to ensure coherent distribution and seamless exchange of information data throughout the system. UUMIS has already imported a number of existing information databases, which have originally maintained by different departments of the Guangzhou municipality. In particular the Urban Planning Database of the Bureau of Urban Planning contains valuable GIS information. In the near future, UUMIS will also build up a number of new databases to meet functional requirement of the DigiM-GZ project. The information data contained in the UUMIS will be updated and extended on a regular basis. 3 Long Term Construction Plan The Bureau of City Engineering and Gardening of Guangzhou Municipality is responsible for the construction of the DigiM-GZ project. The general design of the DigiM-GZ project was finished in December 2004 and was approved by the Government Expert Panel in January 2005. As stated in the general design, the project aims to build universal platform according to a universal plan and using a universal standard on information data. The guiding principles of the project are stated as ‘unified and shared information resource’, ‘function-oriented’ and ‘step-by-step implementation’. At the initial stage, the project will focus on selected civic services due to the lack of experience on system integration. The design of the project should make sure that repeated investment is avoided. The general design also provides design guidelines and technical requirements of the sub-systems. The long term construction plan has the following four steps.
At the moment, the goal of the DigiM-GZ project is to construct the prototype of UUMIS and MIS before March 2006. Up to 2006, the project budget is about 4.0 million USD. It consists of the following phases. 4.1 Construction of UUMIS, November 2004 to August 2005 From November 2004 to January 2005, the geographic information stored in the GIS database of the Bureau of Urban Planning was imported into the UUMIS (see Figure 2). Since then a number of existing information databases of other government departments (bureaus) of the Guangzhou municipality have been integrated into the UUMIS according to their geographic layout, such as water supply, gas supply, drainage and road network. This work had been finished by August 2005.  Figure 2 Interfaces of the UUMIS 4.2 Construction of MIS, March 2005 to May 2006 After the construction of the UUMIS, Management Information System (MIS) will be built. As a function module of the MIS, an e-government system will firstly be build at Bureau of City Engineering and Gardening, where the DigiM-GZ project is based. This e-government system will take over the management of the bureau’s daily administrative routine, such as authorising the usage of urban public space and resources. Since January 2005, the hardware of the e-government system has been prepared, including the communication network, computers, storage equipment and information security products. The software platform had been developed and the software test was started from July 2005. It includes a website, which can provide public information enquiry service, and a software platform. Various administrative applications will be developed on this software platform, including software tools to keep maintenance record, report problems, approve construction plans and work out financial statistics. According to the project plan, this e-government system was tested in May 2006. Using the e-government system of Bureau of City Engineering and Gardening as a model, other sub-systems of the MIS will be constructed according to government department’s individual characteristics. For example the Guangzhou Water Corporation will develop a water supply monitoring system using multi-resource information provided by UUMIS (see Figure 3). This software system had been tested by the end of 2005. Also the Guangzhou Municipality Engineering & Maintenance Department will develop an urban transport network monitoring system (see Figure 4) to monitor and control the road traffic and schedule the maintenance of transport infrastructure.  Figure 3 Interfaces of the e-government system 5 CONCLUSION The DigiM-GZ project will integrate information data to reflect the urban dynamics as a whole. Powered by computer and information technologies, decision makers will be able to access and share relevant information collected by other government divisions. Urban infrastructures will be monitored and maintained according to an optimised schedule to improve reliability and reduce engineering cost. However this is a pioneer project facing a lot of technical and administrative challenges. As a result, the design of the project is developing alone with the implementation of the project. REFERENCES
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