In partnership with Balamand University, SALAR International started the Street Numbering and Naming Project with both Jurd Al-Qayteh and Dreib Al-Awsat union of municipalities, and the Touristic Map Project with Dreib Al-Awsat union of municipalities.
Street Addressing Project
Street addressing is to assign an address using a system of maps and signs that give numbers or names of streets.
This addressing enables the identification of any location on the ground. It would help everyone, including refugees and civil actors, and make it easier to exchange location-related information to find the services they need. It would also benefit NGOs working in the area to better map their interventions.
In Dreib Al-Awsat union of municipalities, the project started in August 2019 with the objectives of developing a touristic map and generating a Street Addressing System for the union with the online license.
In Jurd Al-Qayteh union of municipalities, the project started mid-February 2020 with the objective of generating a Street Addressing System with the online license and assisting in developing zoning maps through engineers trained on the GIS with providing the hardware for the Union.
Both maps are finalized and handed over to their respective union of municipalities.
Touristic Map
In order to help the tourism industry in Akkar in general and in Dreib Al-Awsat union in particular, and since digital maps can locate tourist attraction sites, hotels, landmarks, and women-led businesses, among other essential locations, applying GIS in this region and providing it online for tourists and all interested visitors would positively impact tourism. As such, a touristic map was also created, with the purpose of collecting information about tourist sites and services, such as antiquities, sites, schools, clinics, shops, as well as different other services and included basic information about them, like the website that is directly linked to the website of the Federation, contact numbers, services provided, the way to reach it, in addition to pictures of each site.
All data related to this project was collected by Syrian and Lebanese volunteers. Mohammad Jomaa, a Syrian refugee who worked with the team on Salamati, also worked on the photography of the landmarks for the touristic map.
Similarly, other community members were excited to share their photos and technical support.
Training of Engineers from Community Groups
In order to sustain the project and promote active citizenship, SALAR International also launched a series of trainings in partnership with GIS Center at the Balamand University.
These trainings gathered a number of engineers who volunteered under the umbrella of local authorities for the purpose of moving forward.
A team of engineers who have been equipped with an advanced GIS training to lead related activities will be volunteering with municipalities and union of both Jurd Al-Qayteh and Dreib Al-Awsat and the staff engineers of both unions as active citizenships within their area.
Basemaps for UoM of Jurd Al-Qayteh
The digital property maps for the UoM of Jurd Al-Qayteh were developed from available CADs and blueprints acquired from the Directorate of Land Registration and Cadastre.
Satellite images for the UoM were purchased with high accuracy and spatial resolution (50 cm archived satellite imagery for 2020). A standardized Geodatabase schema was developed and replicated for each municipality within the UoM. The projection and coordinate system for the Geodatabase was defined as double stereographic.All scanned blueprint maps were populated in the Geodatabase for each municipality after being georeferenced and rectified. Also, the CAD files were overlaid over the blueprints to ensure the spatial accuracy of the blueprints.
Afterward, all the data was cleaned and a quality assurance check was carried. All topological errors were checked and fixed.
The acquired satellite imagery was imported into the Geodatabase and overlaid under the parcels.
