All Kouvola’s shore zoning plans were digitised into spatial data format
The City of Kouvola is among the pioneering municipalities in digital planning. Sweco’s experts digitised all of the city’s shore zoning plans so that they can be saved both in the city’s own map services and in the Ryhti information system for the built environment.
Digital formulas are stored in the national Ryhti system
Together with 19 other municipalities, the City of Kouvola participated in the Ministry of Finance‘s KATTI project, which digitised zoning data for the Ryhti system for the built environment . The situation with the detailed plans in Kouvola was already in good shape, so it was natural to start working on the waterfront plans for the water-rich city.
“The shoreline detailed plans drawn up by private landowners were a clear entity, the digitisation of which could be carried out with funding from the KATTI project,” says Essi Kesämaa, Zoning Engineer at the City of Kouvola. The need for digitisation of patterns was also greatest on the beaches. “Some of the scanned zoning maps were in poor condition, which made the work of our building inspectors, for example, more difficult.”
The partly poor quality of the plan maps made the city prepare at the beginning of the project for the fact that it would not be possible to digitise all the shoreline detailed plans during the spring. “However, Sweco was able to digitise all of the more than 120 shore detailed plans within a tight schedule of about four months!”
According to Kesämaa, Sweco’s map and spatial data service experts were selected for the project in a competitive bidding process because the team had the best experience for the job. “In addition, the cost of the work was such that we were able to achieve the most with the funding of the KATTI project.”
The shore zoning plans were interpreted together in the digitisation process
The city had scanned the shoreline plans from paper maps into PDF files, but many details, such as property boundaries, still required interpretation. “That’s why we held regular Teams meetings, which also served as a showcase for how the different work phases, schedule and costs progressed,” says Tapio Tuuttila, Project Manager at Sweco.
The division of labour from Kesämaa went smoothly, and the project proceeded exactly as agreed in the technical kick-off meeting. “The only special thing was the approval process, which meant that we ensured the quality of the data, both georeferenced and vector, before transferring them to the final spatial data format.”
The digitisation of the formulas involved several steps. First, Sweco’s experienced surveyor Jari Jaakkola transferred the data to the map coordinate system. After that, the experts started the CRT digitisation of the data, one plan and map sheet at a time. An important area was georeferencing the data.
“Georeferencing always requires experimentation and finding the best way to do things. The work went much smoother for Sweco than if we had tried to learn it ourselves,” Kesämaa says.
Reliable zoning information for the city’s map services
Digital shore detailed plans are published in the Ryhti system and in the city’s internal and external map service. Pre-interpreted and dimensionally accurate plan data will be made available to both city employees and residents as georeferenced raster maps and vector maps.
“The plan data is tied to the property division and coordinate system, so they are also legally reliable,” Tuuttila adds.
Next, Kouvola will start working on master plans. “The digitisation of the plans continues, and projects will certainly continue to be launched with our framework agreement partner Sweco in the future,” Kesämaa believes.