DFB Planning GIS: Agile and Always Up to Date

Maintenance of the Municipal Planning GIS 2024–2025 · Provincial Council of Bizkaia

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Desde
2025
Proyectos
+ 0
Expertos
+ 0

The Provincial Council of Bizkaia provides citizens, municipal technicians and professionals with an online Urban Planning Information application showing the planning regulations currently in force across the entire Historical Territory of Bizkaia, including land classification, general land uses, zoning categories, development areas and overlapping planning constraints.

To keep the graphical and alphanumeric information in the GIS supporting this application up to date throughout 2024 and 2025, the Municipal Planning Section entrusted Geograma with its maintenance.

The Challenge

The application is only useful if it accurately reflects the planning regulations currently in force. This required:

  • Incorporating urban planning files approved in 2024 and 2025 on a quarterly basis, ensuring that the web application remained up to date.
  • Updating overlapping planning constraints such as flood-risk areas, Special Areas of Conservation (SACs/ZEC) and Special Protection Areas (SPAs/ZEPA), among others.
  • Reviewing Rural Settlements in order to migrate their information to the new data model.
  • Contacting municipalities across Bizkaia to obtain information on building permits granted in development areas where implementation was still pending completion.

All this work had to be carried out using a legacy model containing more than 900 fields, with graphical data stored in geodatabases (.gdb) and alphanumeric information stored in Access databases (.mdb), with a significant amount of duplicated information across both formats.

Each update therefore required two separate copies of the information to be kept synchronised, increasing both the maintenance effort and the risk of errors.

Our collaboration with Geograma has enabled us to keep the urban planning information for the entire Historical Territory updated on a quarterly basis in our web application. We particularly value their technical expertise in GIS and their ability to adapt our tools without any loss of functionality.

Irma Otegui Goiburu
Municipal Planning Section
Provincial Council of Bizkaia

The Solution

Geograma analysed the complete data model and redesigned the way in which the information was managed:

  • Consolidation in PostGIS: graphical and alphanumeric data were integrated into a single PostgreSQL + PostGIS database, eliminating duplicated information across formats.
  • Data model simplification: tables and fields were reviewed, removing those that were unnecessary or no longer maintained. The Provincial Council’s visualisation and validation applications were also adapted to the simplified model.
  • More agile editing: graphical information is edited in QGIS directly against PostGIS, while alphanumeric information is entered using Access forms specifically designed for the project.
  • Automated integration with FME: an FME process transfers data between the working environment (PostGIS) and the client’s target model (GDB/MDB), automatically generating the files consumed by the web application without manual intervention.

Results

  • Urban planning information covering the entire Historical Territory of Bizkaia is updated quarterly and published on the web.
  • A lighter and more manageable data model, reduced from 28 to 20 tables, with no duplication between graphical and alphanumeric information.
  • More efficient updates with fewer errors thanks to a single source of truth and automated data loading through FME.
  • Overlapping planning constraints and Rural Settlements kept up to date, with a redesigned data model for the latter.
  • The Provincial Council’s visualisation and validation applications adapted to the new model without any loss of functionality for users.
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