President of King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST), Prince Dr. Turki bin Saud bin Mohammed Al-Saud and the Minister of Environment, Water and Agriculture, Abdulrahman Abdulmohsen A. AlFadley signed a three-year contract for a project developing the Agricultural Registry (survey phase).
The Deputy Minister for Agriculture Affairs, Eng. Ahmed AlEyadah, said that the project aims at providing comprehensive and integrated geographic databases of agricultural land and agricultural activities, providing modern satellite images, building internet and mobile applications, and recording data on farms and other facilities and activities carried out by the ministry by following a scientific and standard mechanism, and standardizing spatial data references.
AlEyadah added that the project also aims at strengthening the geographic information systems (GIS) in the ministry through providing the necessary software and hardware, peripherals and services. The project contract provides for avoiding any conflict causes disturbance of the functioning of the system needed to operate the project by standardizing the system environment to be compatible with the technical environment of the ministry and to be developed as needed, and to provide the necessary training for the ministry's staff to enable them to manage and operate the geo-information center and provide system maintenance.
The project's tasks include studying the current situation, limiting users' requirements and analyzing them, designing the system, processing modern satellite images of Saudi Arabia, and collecting data and charts, AlEyadah said. Adding that the project objectives and outputs include designing the GIS database structure to meet current and future needs in terms of data collection and documentation, flexibility in editing data, considering the complementarity of database models with the electronic systems and services available at the ministry or those expected to be available later.
Moreover, AlEyadah also pointed out that the project outputs which the ministry strives to achieve include an open database that can accommodate different types of data (aerial survey, field survey or statistical data,) and a database which all applications can interact with and access the necessary data, providing high flexibility in retrieving, analyzing and producing data, enabling the archiving of updated data for future review and analysis, ensuring data consistency , checking data security, and providing an integrated solution that includes data backups and the ability to restore data in case of system failure or emergency shutdown.