The (NCSI) presented a working paper at the Smart Cities Summit held in Muscat on 29 March, which focused on the characteristics and objectives of smart cities and the fundamental requirements for a city to become smart.
Available resources
"Smart City focuses on the effective use of available resources that are seamlessly integrated into our everyday lives. They also focus on making our lives safer from all types of threats by providing enough early alerts, based on continuous monitoring of the various factors that cause risks to human life. Improving business performance is another key aspect," noted NCSI in its presentation. The Center pointed out that a smart city needs to integrate several vital sectors such as government services, utilities, transport and tourism, by linking these sectors to a unified system. Smart cities help improve the quality of life, make the government more efficient and transparent, reduce environmental impacts and risks, support tourism development, and provide energy and resources and support urban planning.
The unified addressing system in the Sultanate, which is operated by the National Center for Statistics and Information, is being developed in coordination with all municipalities, the Ministry of Housing and the Royal Oman Police, and forms one of the key components of smart cities. Spatial data technologies provide a solid foundation for any smart city in planning, implementation and monitoring, relying on smart GIS as a key to developing smart applications to support smart city initiatives, the working paper said.
Applications
The Center reviewed some examples of smart GIS-based applications that are absolutely essential for the Smart City, including those focused on urban planning and land management, as well as spatial intelligent applications that rely entirely on spatial information. These applications also support urban design, area management, land planning, and regional planning that are critical to smart cities, apart from enhancing public safety and improving disaster management.
The Center emphasized the key role played by the national spatial data infrastructure (NSDI) in supporting and developing such smart applications through the provision of unified geographical data and coordinating the development of national projects involving multiple government entities. NSDI is a government initiative to provide a unified structure for geographic information within a comprehensive framework of policies and standards that can support the growth of the national economy. The year 2014 saw the establishment of a general directorate at the National Center for Statistics and Information, and since then there have been many initiatives to build a national infrastructure for spatial information.
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