CASE STUDY

The Road to the Happiest City on Earth

Harnessing location data to accelerate innovation in Dubai

Dubai Municipality has a clear ambition to make Dubai the happiest city in the world in all aspects. As one of the fastest growing cities in the world, it is constantly evolving to accommodate new areas for retail, business, and services every day. This rapid and purposeful development is contributing to the city’s ongoing reputation as a desirable place to live and work as a global hub.

|5 MIN READ

Challenge

As a rapidly growing city, Dubai Municipality has faced significant challenges. An expanded cityscape enables an increase in population, leading to a myriad of considerations: housing, employment, travel, commuting. A rise in population also results in increased demand on services, public transport, utilities, as well as provision of green space for recreation. Rapid urbanisation requires detailed planning, insight to inform decision-making, a safe building environment, an understanding of impact on local environment.

A city developing as quickly as Dubai faces all these challenges, and more – and all of these considerations are in some way supported by geospatial information. Ensuring the city grows in ways that are efficient, and serve its citizens, Dubai Municipality relies on having consistent, world-class location data that can be seamlessly captured and used effectively. Dubai’s Geospatial Information Systems Centre Department (GISCD) supports Dubai Municipality in this goal through the creation, collation, and provision of geospatial data.

Solution

GISCD, with the support of Ordnance Survey, has been evolving the tools and skills to apply some of the most state-of-the-art mapping techniques in the world. This has expanded on GISCD’s own capabilities in harnessing geospatial science for innovation, spanning data management capabilities, and AI-based automation such as Remote Sensing and Automatic Feature Extraction (AFE).

Building these robust systems relies on location data that is consistently high-quality, up-to-date and authoritative for use by stakeholders. By outlining the best tools to use and supporting the evolution of world-leading technical skills, GISCD and Ordnance Survey have provided a strong position for pioneering the use of geospatial data in new technologies and applications. 

"Dubai is one of the fastest growing cities in the world and the GISCD strategy will provide an up-to-date ‘digital twin’ of the city. The extended relationship with Ordnance Survey through the service centre project will support this as well as enable us to reach Dubai Government’s aspiration – making Dubai the happiest city in the world in all aspects." - Eng. Maryam Obaid Al Muhairi, CEO - Buildings Regulation & Permits Agency 

Dubai landscape

Result

The partnership between GISCD and Ordnance Survey worked to establish high location data standards for collection and management of geospatial information in Dubai. This includes policies on data quality and planning.

It also worked to make this data more accessible. Through more efficient sharing of location insights with the professionals that need it, Dubai can ensure its more effective use for public services.

The importance of bringing both domestic and international stakeholders on this journey has been highlighted throughout this project. GISCD, supported by Ordnance Survey experts, enhanced routes to share and deploy data in new and innovative ways, while bringing agencies and entities into an integrated network.

The partnership has helped Dubai to push the limits of location data intelligence in a sustainable and effective way, by establishing channels to share knowledge in geospatial technologies. These will help to ensure knowledge can be successfully exchanged and Dubai can build its own capacity as an international leader, both now and into the future.

The advancements achieved over the course of this collaboration would be of immense value to the citizens of Dubai, and to Dubai’s continued position as a city that the world looks to for technological vision, leadership, and excellence in citizen-centric services.

Project outcome and reflections

Initially a Geospatial Readiness Assessment (GRA) project identified 42 Strategic Initiatives that would underpin the successful realisation of GISCD’s strategic goals. Then, GISCD and OS established the Dubai Service Center, with OS helping to achieve significant improvements in GISCD’s organisation: better operations management, piloting of new Al based technologies, adopting structured data management and architecture.

A strategic direction for GISCD and geospatial data within Dubai was paramount in becoming a world leader. GISCD and OS collaborated to enable GISCD to achieve its goals, deliver increased benefits to the citizens of Dubai, and continue its journey to becoming a recognised, world-leading, geospatial-data organisation.

This collaborative project of optimisation has been successful, ensuring GISCD’s place in the geospatial community in Dubai; by solidifying three strategic pillars:

  • World Class Data: the go-to geospatial data entity in Dubai that can serve quality, authoritative, and trusted data to its stakeholders.
  • Geospatial Leader for Dubai: setting the agenda and future developments for the geospatial community.
  • Global Thought Leader: an innovation-driven organisation in its evaluation and application of geospatial science and technology.

OS also provided advisory services aligned to creating a Digital Twin Roadmap for Dubai. In a geospatial context, Digital Twins are typically virtual models of real-world assets or natural systems. This enables the users to derive invaluable information from the Digital Twin through visualisation, reports, and analytics to enable informed decisions on the current and future needs.

By collating, integrating, and making data from a variety of different sources work in harmony, the City of Dubai can enhance its decision-making capabilities. OS collaborated to consider the Digital Twin Maturity, provide the best practices in the Digital Twin field, assess the existing infrastructure and data, and finally, consider the investment potentials in Digital Twin data.

Over the years working together, GISCD and OS built on the initial Geospatial Readiness Assessment, and the learnings from the Dubai Service Center. They also represented a shift in the relationship between GISCD and OS: moving from required deliverables to consultative partnership and support for implementing the recommendations.

Together, OS has helped optimise its day-to-day operations, and enabled GISCD Senior Leaders to focus on the value and benefits from investments in geospatial science, data, and services.

"Ordnance Survey has been a valuable partner throughout our journey of geospatial enhancement; a transformative agency of geospatial authority. Our collaboration has taken us to the next level of location expertise; one we will continue to advance, to become geospatial leaders for Dubai, and thought leaders worldwide."

Maitha Alnuaimi, GIS Center Director, Dubai Municipality

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