Founded in 1616 by Spaniard Francisco de Herrera Campuzano, the Municipio de Medellín is situated in a valley in the northern part of the Andes Mountains. Its economy was initially based on gold mining and agriculture. As the second largest city in Colombia, Medellín now has a well-established manufacturing base supported by a population in excess of 2.5 million.

Medellín’s planning department acquired its first ESRI ARC/INFO license more than 21 years ago. Since that time, the use of geographic information system (GIS) technology has steadily grown within the municipality to include most other departments including finance, public works, environment, social welfare, education, and transport and traffic. Currently, Medellín has more than 100 licenses for ArcGIS products, and its GIS applications continue to grow in number.

To minimize data redundancy in its expanding use of GIS, the municipality has centralized its information by designing, building, and implementing an enterprise geodatabase. The database contains information that has been consolidated in a single enterprise data framework, which is easily accessed and used by the entire city. Each department within the municipality is responsible for the maintenance of its own data, making it both the information leader and the conservator for information specific to its area of expertise.

According to William Restrepo, IT official at the municipality, "Prior to the implementation of our enterprise GIS, there was geographic information chaos in the municipality. We conducted a survey and found that each of the departments within Medellín used a different system to record and store its geographic data.”

The lack of administrative coordination caused a duplication of data, which increased costs in data acquisition and maintenance for the municipality. It also increased the potential to provide conflicting information to the residents of Medellín as a consequence of maintaining multiple data sources.

Today, accurate data collection is a strategic part of the success that the municipality has enjoyed in expanding its use of GIS technology. Field crews are using ArcPad to collect and validate data on-site, particularly those working in the cadastre department. This has greatly expedited the data collection process and improved data accuracy.

Many government departments in Medellín use the ArcGIS Server Image extension to take advantage of the significant amount of raster imagery that the municipality collects for image analysis and integration with its GIS. The areas covered include urban and rural orthophotos of the city, satellite imagery of the surrounding area, and urban and rural orthophotos of the Aburrá Valley. The image server technology allows the municipality to centralize this information and provide internal and external services both within the government and to the city’s public Internet, with accessibility depending on the information provided and its level of confidentiality.

"Our municipality has achieved many benefits through the use of GIS. Key among them is the opportunity to centralize our geographic information on a standard ArcGIS platform using our enterprise server so that exactly the same information is available to all departments for all their projects," concludes Restrepo.

About the Author

Jim Baumann writes about GIS-related topics for ESRI.  He has written articles on various aspects of GIS and information technology for more than 20 years.
E-mail: jbaumann@esri.com