DPWH Advances its Enterprise GIS
The Department of Public Works and Highways [DPWH] of the Philippines government recently upgraded its enterprise GIS [geographic information systems].
The DPWH upgraded Enterprise GIS will be powered by Esri's ArcGIS core GIS platform.
DPWH Secretary Rogelio L. Singson said, "the investment will further boost the quality and delivery of our services" to the Filipino people under the administration of President Benigno Simeon C. Aquino."
Aside from the numerous technical and management advantages that GIS technology provides the DPWH, Singson said "improving our GIS technology will further enhance our governances specially in identifying, analyzing and monitoring any possible cheating, short cuts, and such, in the implementation of various public works all over the country."
On the other hand, DPWH Undersecretary Rafael C. Yabut said the move "is being implemented as part of our Road Information and Management Support System [RIMSS] project. This will expand the GIS in the DPWH and all our district offices all over the country."
"Our department will be able to deploy its geospatial national road datasets on the web, and allow our personnel to remotely manage spatial data. More importantly, this will enhance our governance specially in monitoring, tracking, and supervising construction projects all over the country, as well as in weeding out any forms of cheating and corruption,” Yabut added.
"When fully implemented, it would be possible for DPWH to engage any citizen with an Internet connection to check out any ongoing public work projects in his or her municipality or province, and report to us whether such projects are implemented properly or if any anomalies are observed. Likewise, by engaging the citizenry, we can get their feedback on what roads are bad, are improperly or poorly constructed, and the like," Yabut further explained.
On the technical side, DPWH Director Elizabeth Yap and Chairperson of the GIS Steering Committee said "we would be able to work towards the vision of the Secretary by enhancing the tools that would be used by the Department in its infrastructure planning, construction, and maintenance activities, including the integration and synthesis of our geographically referenced information with those from other government agencies and other sources, for analysis and decision-making purposes."
"More importantly," Yap said, "with our improved enterprise GIS, we will have an environment that can be used to promote the widespread usage of all our spatial data, which at present is only used in GIS-enabled user-exclusive applications."
With this move, Yap said "it will enable the DPWH to better plan and locate public works away from geographic locations which are prone to calamities such as earthquakes, floods, landslides, ground subsidence, etc."
Francisca Nasol-Dayrit, Executive Vice President of Geodata Systems Technologies, Inc., the exclusive distributor of Esri products said that "we will be providing the software, trainings, technical support, software maintenance and upgrade, and other related services to make the DPWH's Enterprise GIS successful."
The upgrade of the DPWH Enterprise GIS will have ArcGIS as the platform. ArcGIS is a complete system for designing and managing solutions through the application of geographic knowledge. The ArcGIS core platform in the DPWH will include ArcView, ArcInfo, 3D Analyst, Spatial Analyst, Network Analyst, Geostatistical Analyst, ArcGIS Server, ArcGIS Server 3D Analyst Extension, ArcGIS Server Network Analyst Extension, Mobile GIS, and ArcPad. ArcGIS is developed by Esri of Redlands, California and is the world market leader in GIS technology.
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