Electoral Office to scan all Malta buildings in Google-type mapping

The electoral office is to carry out a €900,000 geo-mapping of Malta’s building units, in a Google-type photographic survey using low-emission cars.

The Electoral Office said it wants to consolidate its records of addresses with spatially accurate points that also reflect the rapidly changing streetscapes of Malta.

It also wants the winning tenderer for the prospective contract to only use electric vehicles, which will be then equipped with photographic instruments, together with GPS and inertial measurement equipment.

The Address Register Project is funded by Recovery and Resilience Plan Funds, of which 25% of that total allocation is aimed at digital objectives and the digitalisation of public administration and public services.

The Address Register Project will create a database that also feeds into applications that will serve government-to-government areas, as well as government-to-business and customer sectors.

“These e-services will be capitalising on economies of scale and will contribute directly towards the attainment of Digital Malta, and the concept of one-government will be further enhanced,” the Electoral Office said in its tender proposal.

The Electoral Office already provides the administrative machinery for the registration, transfer and cancellation of voters and organisation of elections.

“The need was felt for the Electoral Office to initiate a process of consolidation of current efforts in the acquisition of address points that are spatially accurate, reflect the in-situ changes as development occurs in a rapidly changing streetscape, lineage drafting of processes, identifying hardware, software and content issues as well as ensuring retention and continuity, which had long been sought,” the Office said.

The Electoral Office’s address management unit also carries outdoor numbering exercises and naming of streets in collaboration with the Street Naming Committee. Both exercises require monitoring and enforcing if necessary.

The unit also verifies issues relating to official locality boundaries and address points, carry out research on previous door numbering and street-naming exercises and is responsible for the database in the government’s Address Management System.

The Address Register Project builds on previous projects that included MITTS’s – later MITA – major effort to map all doors, a local government exercise to map street furniture and doors, the Water Services Corporations’ detailed meter point, and the NSO’s census to map enumeration locations.

However, under the current system, these systems do not communicate with each other, nor are they readily available under one digital pivot.

The baseline scanning and mapping exercise will set up a nationwide database of all the built units upon which all other datasets, information systems and models will be layered for inter-governmental and entity systems communication, around a unique layer.

“This will eliminate redundancy, duplication and multiplicity as the address data layer will feed all other systems,” the Electoral Office said.