For the achievement of excellence, Jeddah Municipality has decided to implement the Local Urban Observatory for Jeddah City and its internal area (Municipalities, and Districts) based on Geographic Information System (GIS). GIS through its capabilities would deliver perfect tools for manipulation, simulation, and analysis of Urban Information supported by a smart GIS map for Jeddah City.

As a step forth in this direction, Jeddah Municipality has developed a GIS Web-based interface. The GIS interface is to allow public users to present the database in an analytical way via geographic maps, charts, graphs and statistical reports. In addition, the GIS interface contains special and easy to use tools for displaying indicators and viewing their results using smart maps and tables. The analytical results are viewed by authorized administrators securely to be able to make their own analysis and results for the urban planning process.

The Web GIS Interface for JUO was developed on latest technologies from Microsoft (Dot Net 2.0) & ESRI (ArcGIS Server 9.2), where best practices in the world of software engineering were applied.

The Web Interface offers the following functionalities:

1. Viewing and browsing Jeddah Basemap data
2. Getting information about geographic entities displayed on the map
3. Querying basemap data and display the results using the map
4. Viewing and browsing Jeddah urban indicators
5. Searching for more information about urban indicators using the name, category, or type
6. Generate urban indicators and simulate the results using colored maps, charts, tables, and reports
7. Compare indicators over time
8. Compare Jeddah indicators with other cities
9. Export indicators data to Microsoft Excel
10. Print GIS maps