Galicia Lands Bank is an institutional instrument, belonging to the Galician Agency for Rural Development (AGADER), whose main function is to regulate the use and exploitation of plots with an agrarian vocation to avoid their abandonment. The Bank has opted for SITEGAL as a tool for individuals and administrative personnel to carry out all the procedures with the parcels incorporated in it. In the development of this tool iCarto provides, through a collaboration with the UDC and the USC, all its experience in the field of GIS and Web technologies, as well as its support in the development tasks in the rest of the modules with this system counts.
Problems posed by the project
For a long time, in the autonomous community of Galicia, a paradox has been taking place in the agricultural context: agricultural or forest land is a scarce factor par excellence, but at the same time, it is a poorly used good and whose owners or managers do not achieve put in value. This situation has been generating all kinds of mobilizations and initiatives for years to try to achieve that much desired use and thus enhance the agricultural, livestock, forestry or even heritage conservation sectors.
Between 2003 and 2006 the University of Santiago de Compostela and the University of A Coruña jointly participated in the development of a prototype to apply GIS and Web technologies to boost the land market in Galicia. As a result of this collaboration, the Galicia Lands Information System for the Lands Bank (SITEGAL) was born as a project, whose development continues to this day, and in which iCarto has been involved since 2013.
From the SITEGAL portal, the processes of incorporation of plots to the Land Bank and their subsequent lease by individuals are currently managed telematically, integrating these processes with the e-administration tools of the Xunta de Galicia. This makes available to citizens and interested parties the possibility of entering or leasing the plots directly in the Bank’s catalog, and on the other hand, it facilitates the tasks of control and monitoring of the procedures by those responsible for it.
And how we solved them
The new powers of the Bank, together with the progressive increase in the number of leases and incorporated plots, means that the work of managers increases both in quantity and diversity. At SITEGAL, it has been possible to identify and define a work flow that covers all the steps from the moment someone decides to incorporate a plot into the Bank, through the signing of the lease, to the control of the invoices that these procedures generate. This flow has been transferred to the tool, including the registration of all the necessary documentation and increasing its integration with the Electronic Headquarters of the Xunta de Galicia.
In addition, private users who decide to bet on the electronic management of their requests have the possibility of knowing at all times the status of their procedures, their invoices and everything related to their properties, being also notified of any change or interest in their goods via email or SMS.
From iCarto we have contributed much of our technical knowledge to the project, supporting the rest of the team in various modules of the tool, such as:
- Improved functionality with the web viewer
- Integration with the Electronic Office
- Optimization of the ORM framework in the data layer
- Java technology migration at the interface layer
