Minimal data base organization for municipal administration - support to geoprocessing implementation for city councils

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This document discusses methodological guidelines for supporting the implantation of Geographic Information Systems in cities, as part of the project Proex-Mec-Cidades 2007, of the Ministry of Cities. In the end of 2007, the Ministry of Cities, in collaboration with the federal universities, initiated the Poext-Mec-Cidades, a project with the goal of facilitating municipal technicians in the use of geoprocessing. It is a program that incorporates projects of university involvement, with an emphasis on aiding public and social agents in the development of support actions for the state and municipal public sectors, aiming for the institutional development and implementation of information systems that allow the elaborating of plans and projects of urban development, as states the legislature of the City Statute and the National Politic of Urban Development (NPDU), having as objectives to support projects of university collaboration that would contribute to strengthening the NPUD, committed to training technical staffs from public administration as well as social agents, for planned and interactive management. UFMG trained technicians from meso-regions of the metropolitan areas of Belo Horizonte and of Jequitinhonha. As an integral part of the project, it was a goal, not only of preparing the technicians for their first uses of the geoprocessing tools, but also to support them in their firsts steps in constructing minimal cartographic databases for the municipals. The procedure, structured as methodological guidelines, was nicknamed “how to begin”, and this is this article’s object of study. The foci of the present article are the related projects aimed at the training of municipal technicians in the use of the geoprocessing, through courses, the designing of Internet sites for self-learning, elaboration of classes and video-lessons and the building of a methodological guideline. Methodological guidelines were constructed in the format “How to start” with the objective of giving support to municipal technicians in organization principles and the treatment and construction of cartographic and alphanumeric databases consisting of databases of geographic information systems. All the guidelines are presented in simple language and consider, exclusively, the use of free software and data that can be found on the internet. The guide presents information on how to identify the demands on municipal management, how to search for data – maps and tables, how to organize the data, how to convert and adjust the data and organize the products in a Geographic Information System. It’s a way to support a beginning of the use of GIS in common practice and to create a culture of organizingspatial data and spatial analysis. All this information so far discussed must be stored in an orderly way, so as not to lose ourselves with so much information. Create a folder to store all raw data and another to store all alterations, by-products and derivatives from the original files. It is common to produce selections, thematic maps or editions that may serve for other projects. In all file folders, create a text file describing the origin of each file, including how they were produced, scale and origin as well as any other information available about them. We have demonstrated, through the present text, that using only free software and data available on the internet, it is possible to initiate the process of structuring GIS for municipal managing.