GIS Good Practice Municipality of Toruń, Poland Partner 12 for EUROSCAPES 1
What is GIS? A Geographic Information System (GIS) is a technological tool for comprehending geography and making intelligent decisions. GIS integrates hardware, software and data for capturing, managing, analyzing, and displaying all forms of geographically referenced information. GIS helps you answer questions and solve problems by looking at your data in a way that is quickly understood, easily shared and allows us to view, understand, question, interpret, and visualize data in many ways that reveal relationships, patterns, and trends in the form of maps, globes, reports, and charts.a good GIS program is able to process geographic data from a variety of sources and integrate it into a map project. 2
Organizational structure for implementing EUROSCAPES project in Toruń, Poland 1. Head of the Environment and Greenery Department of Torun s City Office - responsible for definition of the municipal needs within the EUROSCAPES project and its monitoring, among others; 2. Head of the Cartography and Geodesy Department of Torun s City Office - responsible for implementing GIS in a view of Torun s City Office needs and its projects, among others; 3. Technical assistant for GIS administration, implementation and maintenance of its database. 4. EUROSCAPES project s coordinator, responsible for creation, development, implementation and monitoring of the Landscape Management Plan. 3
Methodology for implementation of EUROSCAPES project into GIS 1. Decision for creating the GIS tools for EUROSCAPES project 2. Strategic plan: a) definition of Toruń s needs: What goals do we want to achieve? How? When? What kind of IT tools we must use? How many people will be working for the EUROSCAPES project s implementation? 4
What kind of expertises will be necessary? What kind of costs will be need for the EUROSCAPES project s implementation? What kind of already existing data, storing by Toruń s City Office, will be useful to achieve my goals? b) definition of data structure, maps for GIS viewer; 3. Creating the GIS Web system 4. Monitoring and evaluation 5
EUROSCAPES project s implementation into GIS, in Toruń, Poland Step by step Municipality of Toruń, Poland, has joined the EUROSCAPES Project as Partner 12, by signing the Partnership Agreement, on the beginning of 2010. As a result, a special interdepartmental unit, called Torun s Working Team for the realization of EUROSCAPES project, was established by the Mayor of Torun s City, on the base of its Resolution n 0 64, dated on March 10, 2010. The first stage of work carried out for the project s implementation into GIS has been dealing with the identyfication and diagnostics of the existing GIS tools, which are used by differents departments/units of the Municipality of Toruń. Once, the choice of the appropriate GIS tools was made, the Team has decided to correlate them with the new data, especially created for the EUROSCAPES project needs, in order to integrate them for adjust presentation and exploitation on the public Torun s GIS Website, called GEOPORTAL, available at: mapa.um.torun.pl These actions allowed to reduce the costs of whole operation, by the lack of necessity for the purchase of separate server or additional specialist software, for example. 6
Through the specific guidelines provided by the Cartography and Geodesy Department of Torun s City Office that is responsible for GEOPORTAL management, the Team has acquired the appropriate know-how for the right data preparation, related to its recording in.shp or.dgn formats, for example. In consequence, the EUROSCAPES data are coherent with the existing cadastral maps for Toruń city and the current geographic coordinates grid, up-dated in 2000. 7
Strategic Plan The Strategic Plan mostly consists of the constant analysis of the existing cadastral maps that are displayed on Toruń s GEOPORTAL website. Digital cadastral surveying data is structured into numerous thematic layers on: number of parcels; number of addresses; name of streets; building location; location agricultural land; parcels location; city boundary; ownership structure; location of the gas pipes; location of the heating pipes; location of the telecommunication lines; location of the sanitary sewer; location of the water pipes; relative relief; orthophotomap 2011; 8
orthophotomap 2006 ; Goggle orthophotomap; Etc. Torun s Working Team for the realization of EUROSCAPES project settled down that a digital cadastral map can be the basis for additional thematic layers, successively converting it into a complex system for management of administrative units. Viewing map layers and creating thematic maps for the Landscape Management Plan constitutes the actual GIS part of EUROSCAPES project, implemented in Toruń. The Team consecutively develops new and updates existing GIS thematic layers for the needs of LMP, that are related to: Toruń's high-rise developments borders; Torun fortress system's location; 9
urban green spaces identification; agricultural areas identification; Toruń's communication; Kotlina Dybowska's Dune location; Kotlina Toruńska's Dune location; identification of railway tracks; identification of airport; identification of closed areas in Toruń City; Toruń's protected landscape areas' borders; municipal parks identification; residential developments borders; nature reserve called Kępa Bazarowa Islet; nature reserves boarders; non-living nature monuments; living nature monuments; woodland ground flora identification; forest identification; hypsometry; historical building location; UNESCO area location; historical parcels location; allotments identification; Nieszawa s Vistula Valley location; 10
Drwęca Valley location; Vistula Valley location; Etc. Torun s Working Team for the realization of EUROSCAPES decided to give up with the time and additional costs consuming specialists field works, such us detailed tree or parking facilities inventory, among others. 11
Most data and thematic layers for EUROSCAPES s Landscape Management Plan are displayed within the GEOPORTAL heading entitled Zasoby środowiska i ochrona przyrody. GEOPORTAL and the structure of GIS-Web viewer In order to achieve the EUROSCAPES project goals and implement the Landscape Management Plan principles and methodology, in an appropriate way, it was determined that Torun s GIS Web viewer (GEOPORTAL), available at: mapa.um.torun.pl should allow the following actions: displaying GIS data (either vector and raster data, in order to store spatial data); 12
displaying CAD data; Map Navigation (zoom, zoom in, zoom out, over-viewing map, scale, etc.); asking the question to database ( Search item); displaying data - according to location, number, etc.; measurement of longitude and latitude; displaying GIS data according to different symbols; creating liens between different items, such as.txt. or.xls files with the linkage map data; creating topological objects; analysis 2D : - selection of the specific data and location; - drawing buffer. conversion of the GIS data; managment of the GIS database; 3D visualization; creating and using digital elevation models; creating different maps compositions; address geocoding; 13
creating different statistics; exporting the GIS data to vector format (SHP/GML) or to raster format (GeoTIFF); displaying parcels information with greenery information; using points by different set of coordinates; using actual orthophotomap. 14
Conclusion The natural environments are constantly changing. Therefore, the data related to the green spaces in Toruń, for example, are updated almost every day. Good GIS system allows to manage this thousands of information. In order to see the EUROSCAPES heading, please direct yourself to: http://mapa.um.torun.pl/geoportal/f?p=mapa:110:12514232971 02401 15