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1. Introduction
Belo Horizonte was one of the first Brazilian municipal administrations to develop an urban Geographic Information System. Situated within the local government tradition of local government, the development and implementation of the Geographic Information System (GIS) commenced in 1989 and has proceeded significantly to the extent that it has become the most complete experience of its kind throughout Brazil, with applications covering areas such as education, health, sanitation, urban planning, transportation and traffic, among others. This article reflects on the experiences of this this GIS project, from the technology acquisition and team formation phases, through the creation of the geographic database, to the development of applications and dissemination among users. This "successful" experience of GIS implementation is contrasted with some GIS projects in India to highlight probable areas of emphasis in future GIS projects in developing countries.

Up until 1988, Brazilian municipal administrations had a limited scope of action: the public resources were primarily the responsibility of the state and federal governments and the processes were largely centralized. After 1988, through the Constitution a decision was taken to curtail this centralization, and new responsibilities and powers were transferred to the municipal governments. The municipalization of various public services, such as health, basic sanitation, energy, transportation, and traffic were tasks for which the municipal administrations were not prepared for, and which also placed additional pressure on them to be more responsive towards the larger population.

For the municipal administrations to be able to fulfill these new demands, there was the need to increase the level of efficiency through the adoption of new approaches, and the use of non-conventional methods of integration and analysis. It is within this broad context that Belo Horizonte municipal administration's geoprocessing project was conceived. Belo Horizonte, the fourth largest Brazilian city, has a population of more than two million people spread over 335 square kilometers, and is the center of a metropolitan area that houses around 3.5 million people. The project of introducing the technology of geoprocessing in the Belo Horizonte municipal administration is widely recognized at the national level, for its pioneering nature and its innovative proposals, which gave priority to social applications, including education, health, transportation, traffic, environmental control, taxation, infrastructure, and fiscalization.

2. The Process of Implementing the GIS Technology
In the first work of its kind in Brazil, Belo Horizonte began in 1989 striving towards greater economic and administrative efficiency. A key objective of their efforts was to integrate the most significant databases on the city, through the use of Geographic Information System (GIS) based tools. This would allow public administrators to visualize and control urban dynamics, thereby providing the citizens with higher-quality public services and democratic access to information.

Belo Horizonte was the first Brazilian city to implement a full-scale GIS, instead of beginning with a pilot project. In 1992, a very large geographic database was assembled in vector format from stereophotogrammetry, comprising around 95 different themes, and covering subjects such as street network, buildings, hydrography, relief, infrastructure and urban facilities. A complete set of information on street addresses for the entire city, comprising around 380,000 individual georeferenced addresses, was also built. On the whole, the initial database included around 3.5 million geographic objects.

Over the last seven years, the database has evolved significantly, including a large amount of information related to the comprehensive set of GIS applications. In general, there are applications on education, health, transportation and traffic, urban planning, socio-economic indicators, water and sewage networks, urban cadastre, land use, and parceling. Also, other applications, such as leisure, social development, the environment and economic activities have been set up. Applications on sanitation, taxation and emergency dispatch are currently under way, as well as improvements to several of the initial sections, especially related to the management of the city's bus system. Presently, the database includes about 5 million geographical items, divided into more than 250 different classes.

PRODABEL, a municipal level information technology company, has been responsible for the design and development of these urban GIS-based applications for the last 7 years, and it is also responsible for managing the city's digital geographic database. In 1992, at an early stage of its development, Belo Horizonte's geoprocessing project was awarded the Green Action Diploma by the Society for Environmental Management and Crefisul Bank, in an event which ran parallel to the Rio-92 international environmental meeting. We now discuss the manner in which PRODABEL has been managing this project of GIS implementation in the city.

2.1 Acquisition of computer resources
The geoprocessing project started to take shape in 1992, with the acquisition of equipment and software based on the initial definition of resources for a GIS. These initial resources were obtained through public tender, including RISC technology workstations, connected to a local network, under a Unix-like operational system with a graphic user interface based on the X-Windows/Motif standard. Additionally, the necessary peripheral equipment, such as digitizer tables and plotters, was detailed and acquired after a similar tendering process.

The software was chosen based on its potential for integration of data coming from several different sources, as well as for its level of technological sophistication. The software selected (which is in use even now) is based on an object-oriented database management system, which stores geographical data organized on a continuous geographical base. Over time, this was supplemented by the adoption of an intermediary, lower cost solution, based on micro-computers and on the MS-Windows operational system.

2.2 Basic mapping

In October 1992, with the arrival of the final set of photogrammetric data in digital form, the process of setting up the permanent geographical database began. In 1993, Belo Horizonte had a continuous geographical base in place, covering all the municipal territory, where around 3,500,000 geographical items were distributed among 97 different classes of information [1]. Table 1 shows a list of the main classes of items.

Despite being rich and very detailed, the database set up from the stereorestitution did not yet contain any of the necessary elements for users to be able to locate specific places in the city in a quick and simple way. The solution to this problem was to localize geographically the addresses in the city, and to accompany this with a network of centerlines, dividing the city into census sectors, neighborhoods, regional administrations, and other spatial reference units.

• Addresses
  The correspondence address is the spatial reference form most often found in information systems, even in the non-automated systems. This is also the form of spatial localization used most often by the general public. The use of the address as a key to accessing information makes the GIS much more user-friendly, making access easier and more popular. Economic activity records, property records and data about incidents in the urban environment generally have address as the principal reference. The creation of an address base was a fundamental step towards the successful implementation of the GIS. To be more specific, it was necessary to establish ways of transforming addresses (in the form they are given by the general public, or in the form they are stored in the available information systems) into geographical coordinates, and vice-versa.
  
  
• Centerlines
  In traditional urban basic mapping, no graphic element is used to represent the actual streets. Only items that define it visually, such as curbs square boundaries, are represented in the maps. To make up for this omission, a network of centerlines were created, the fundamental elements of which are nodes, at the crossings, and arcs, each corresponding to the stretch of the street between crossings. The network of centerlines makes it possible, using simple and efficient algorithms, to trace the best route between any two points of the city, embodying accessibility numerically, an indispensable concept in urban planning.
  
  
• Census sectors
  The greatest difficulty in developing social applications is usually in getting hold of trustworthy and precise indicators. In the case of indicators from a demographic census, the use of the GIS offers two important advantages:
  
  
  • the option of georeferencing the indicators, i.e. associating them to individual different regions of the city, in order to understand better the intra-urban inequality and the influence of the urban infrastructure on the standard of living of the inhabitants;
    
  • the option of collecting the data from a demographic census according to different spatial units of reference to those used in the Census.
    

In order to make this type of analysis viable, the first step was thus to georeference all the census sectors of the city, which are the basic work units used by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). This work was carried out at one of the earliest stages of the project, so that this demographic information could be put to use by geographic applications as soon as possible.

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