The Client
The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine (DAFM) is one of the 17 departments within the Irish Government. Its mission is to lead the sustainable development of a competitive consumer focused agri–food sector and to contribute to a vibrant rural economy and society.
The Problem
As part of is role, the Sea Fisheries Administration Division of DAFM is responsible for the management of Ireland’s 6 Fishery Harbour Centres (FHCs). To help visualise and manage its property assets across multiple sites, DAFM required the creation of a GIS property management database for all property within the 6 Fishery Harbour Centres.
What We Did
Mallon working closely with the Department’s Marine Engineering division, deployed a full–time GIS specialist to DAFM’s engineering office in Ballyshannon for a period of 12 weeks. When required, the GIS specialist was also deployed to DAFM sites in Galway city and Tralee. The project was undertaken in two phases. The first phases concentrated on 2 FHCs and the second on the remaining 4 FHCs.
To ensure the production of accurate GIS datasets, DAFM required a land surveying service to determine boundary extends and for ground–truthing. Land surveys were conducted by our partner, Acute Engineering Services Ltd, with the information that was captured then disseminated to our GIS Specialist.
As part of the project, the GIS Specialist was also required to undertake the preparation of maps for the property leases and licences. These maps had to fully comply with the requirements of the Property Registrations Authority.
The GIS Specialist used ArcGIS 10.4 to create a spatial database of land parcels within the limits of Ireland’s Fishery Harbour Centres. This involved the extraction of property data from various sources; CAD drawings, paper maps, PRAI data, etc. to create the property database. This was combined with survey drawings and OSi base maps to create an accurate database containing all relevant information pertaining to ownership of land within the FHCs. Also added to this were other relevant marine data such as ArcGIS Feature Service Layers, Navigation Lights, Hydrographic Surveys, Osi Web Map Services, Underground Services, Topographic Surveys, Bathymetric Surveys and Geotagged Photographs.
The spatial database was deployed to all FHC sites with ArcGIS Explorer Desktop chosen as a suitable user interface. This database is stored in an ESRI file Geodatabase and is accessed across DAFM’s internal network.
The Benefits
- The spatial database enables DAFM to easily manage leaseholds, freeholds, sales and licencing of their assets across multiple sites
- Staff can easily access the spatial database through their internal network
- DAFM are now able to visualise the location of all their property assets
- Data security was maintained throughout the project by adhering to already established Data Policies and storing all data on internal DAFM servers
- GIS has been promoted within DAFM and as a result of this project, other problems are being tackled using GIS as a solution