CartoCiudad Web

CartoCiudad Project

CartoCiudad is the result of merging together and harmonising information provided by several national public bodies, mainly General Directorate of Cadastre (Dirección General del Catastro), National Statistics Institute (Instituto Nacional de Estadística, INE), Post Office (Sociedad Estatal de Correos y Telégrafos) and National Geographic Institute (Instituto Geográfico Nacional, IGN), and also regional organisations in some Autonomous Regions (Basque Country, Navarre, Valencia, Balearic Islands, La Rioja, Andalusia and Murcia). The outcome of this integration process is a Geographic Information System of a national and seemless streets, ways and roads network, topologically structured and complemented with urban cartography, census-based and postal information, covering all the Spanish municipalities.

This project, which could be defined as a national street and road map made up with official data, is something more, not only because it includes information of another type (e.g. census based) but also because it has been designed to offer advanced web-based geocoding and routing services.

It is an ambitious, far-reaching project whose aim is to become the reference cartography in the street map field. In order to achieve this objective, different analysis and studies about methodologies for maintaining and updating the information by the collaborating national organisations and also other public authorities such as some regional authorities(Comunidades Autónomas) and local authorities(Entidades Locales) are now being considered and tested.

The original data come from the organisations with national responsibility for this particular field, namely:

• General Directorate of Cadastre (Economy and Finance Ministry) provides the street axis geometries that have to be completed, updated, topologically structured and connected to the roads network by using other official data (regional and local street maps and orthoimages from the National Aerial Orthophotography Plan (Plan Nacional de Ortofotografía Aérea, PNOA). Cadastre also provides CartoCiudad with building numbers which are later linked to the streets, ways and roads network to ensure the address geocoding and the routing calculation. Additionally the urban cartography comes mainly from Cadastre: blocks, parcels, buildings, urban toponymy and other auxiliary lines like sidewalks, stairs, etc.

• INE (Economy and Finance Ministry) provides the official name of streets, which are to be assigned to the geometry originally coming from Cadastre to make up a street map with official data. Since this organisation is in charge of delimiting the electoral census sections, the geometry of these features is directly integrated into CartoCiudad database just by transforming the data from the native Coordinate Reference System into the official one and adopting CartoCiudad data model.

• Post Office (Ministry of Infrastructures and Transports) contributes the list of address-based postcodes, the fundamental base for generating the postal address polygons of CartoCiudad.

• IGN (Ministry of Infrastructures and Transports) is in charge of providing CartoCiudad with the roads and ways from the National Cartographic Base at 1/25,000 scale (BCN25) and from the National Topographic Base at the same scale (BTN25), giving continuity to the street map. Toponyms from the National Geographic Gazetteers and the municipality boundaries come from IGN.  Orthophotographies from PNOA are also used as a reference to check all the abovementioned information and also to update information when necessary.

The region of Navarre (Comunidad Foral de Navarra) and Basque Country (País Vasco) run their own cadastral organisations, so cadastral data in those regions are obtained directly from their respective agencies, with whom Collaboration Agreements have been signed to produce CartoCiudad.

Moreover, Valencian Community (Comunidad Valenciana) authority has signed another Collaboration Agreement with IGN in order to work together in the production of CartoCiudad in that region. This work was carried out by Cartographic Institute of Valencia (Institut Cartogràfic Valencià - ICV) in 2007.

Updating and Maintenance of the CartoCiudad Project

In 2010 and 2011 updating works have been carried out in collaboration with some Autonomous Regions, according to the legal framework of the Royal Decree 1545/2007, November 23rd, about the National Cartographic System. Some Collaboration Agreements have been signed, with the aim of coordinating the updating and maintenance process optimizing the management and the costs and finally sharing the geographic data produced and the rights to transfer and reproduce that information.

The initial collaboration with Valencian Community has been extended in 2010 by signing another Collaboration Agreement this time to update CartoCiudad. In 2010 La Rioja and Balearic Islands (Illes Balears) regions have carried out the update of the database in their areas. Moreover a biennial Collaboration Agreement has been signed with Murcia to update all the municipalities of the region.

Thanks to a long and tight collaboration with Andalusia (Andalucía), in mid 2011 a Collaboration Agreement was signed between IGN and the recently created Statistics and Cartography Institute of Andalusia (Instituto de Estadística y Cartografía de Andalucía), in the wake of the project of the new Unified Digital Street map of Andalucía (Callejero Digital de Andalucía Unificado).

With its own means, IGN has carried out the updating of Madrid, Catalonia (Catalunya), Castile-La Mancha (Castilla-La Mancha) and Aragon (Aragón).

Presently, CartoCiudad covers almost the whole Spain except for the municipalities of Castile-Leon (Castilla y León) with less than 300 inhabitants. Please look up the list of municipalities available in CartoCiudad here (1).

Below a map is shown with the production carried out and planned for 2011 and 2012:

(1) NOTE: Throughout 2011 the municipalities produced in 2010 will be made available and published in CartoCiudad geoportal.