The Northern Ireland Planning Service

2006-08-17

The Northern Ireland Planning Service, Belfast, has been recognized for excellence in the geographic information system (GIS) field with a 2006 Special Achievement in GIS (SAG) award at the Twenty-sixth Annual ESRI International User Conference in San Diego, California. ESRI, the world leader in GIS software, presents the award to organisations and agencies that display dedication and commitment through their use of GIS technology. The winners of the award are chosen out of more than 150,000 organizations worldwide.

The Northern Ireland Planning Service is implementing an integrated planning system for Northern Ireland and modernising the current planning process.  The new planning system has a crucial role to play in delivering programmes such as those for achieving sustainable development; for urban and rural regeneration; for improving infrastructure and transport; targeting social need and promoting equality.

ESRI Ireland nominated the Northern Ireland Planning Service for the SAG award as a result of their approach to building an enterprise GIS infrastructure to support the new planning system. Its aims are to centralise the storage of data (both business and related) and to streamline the process of creating, maintaining and disseminating the geographic components of development plans for Northern Ireland.

At it most basic level, this involves the creation of regional databases against which regional staff can create and maintain development plans for their area. These regional databases are independent data repositories, but they will be linked to a centrally managed master database to which development plans will be migrated periodically as part of the general workflow. This central database will be used for quality control and map production purposes when a plan is ready for publishing. As such, all of the above components constitute a physical and logical structure for managing spatial data internal to the Planning Service.”

“The SAG awards celebrate the achievement and vision of innovators in the GIS field,” says Jack Dangermond, ESRI president. “Each winner brings benefits to their communities and influences others to do the same.”

“I am delighted to represent Planning Service to receive this award from Jack Dangermond in front of an audience of 13,500 people from all corners of the globe. It was also great to raise the profile of on this worldwide stage and demonstrate that we are at the cutting edge in terms of the deployment and use of GIS" said Joe Beattie, Head of ePlanning & ICT for the Planning Service.