c-plan® - Geo-Information Systems

Baden - BIG

BIG: this acronym stands for „Badener Informationssystem für Geografische Daten“ (Baden information system for geographic data).

This is a joint project mounted by the city council and Regionalwerke AG Baden (RWB, the city's utilities): a coordinated data pool for the geodata of both project partners. BIG's centrepiece is the open geodata server TOPOBASE™ provided by c-plan®, which manages, analyzes and distributes the partners' comprehensive geographic data. This enables the rapid intranet provisioning of information across domains and specialized departments. BIG is playing a pioneering role which will, in the long term, benefit the City of Baden, RWB, geometers, property developers, housebuilders, architects and engineering offices. RWB supplies not only the region with water, but also over 13,000 homes with power and more than 2,000 dwellings with natural gas or district heating. RWB also offers other services, like customer administration, meter reading and billing, documentation or network planning / construction / operation and maintenance. Hence, the geoinformation system (GIS) is of growing interest as a tool for managing this invaluable data and as a key marketing instrument.

It enables RWB to trade in data, because it can offer its customers high-quality and up-to-the-minute data, plans and documentation.
Hugo Doessegger, general manager at RWB, says: “The GIS is becoming an increasingly important tool in our company. Without it we would be unable to perform our complex tasks either today or in tomorrow's liberalized market."
The realization that the customers of both providers had similar requirements as regards the topicality, quality and transparency of the queried data finally led to the idea of jointly managing and processing the information in TOPOBASE™. The system's flexibility and openness clinched matters at a demonstration. On top of this, the surveying application module of TOPOBASE™ is compatible with the local official maps and has already proved its functionality and reliability in practical operations.