The Istanbul Water and Sewerage Administration (ISKI) provides potable water to a city with a population of more than 11 million. ISKI manages all types of groundwater and surface water resources to provide a domestic potable water supply, which it distributes to demand centers within the city, and conducts studies necessary to design and build new facilities and carry out the maintenance and repairs to existing facilities.

ISKI also collects wastewater and stormwater, and safely removes it from communities to ensure its safe treatment and discharge. This helps prevent the pollution of the region’s water sources, the local shoreline, rivers and streams, and groundwater.

The goal of ISKI’s asset management information system project was to achieve better management of all of the real estate parcels in metropolitan Istanbul that ISKI either serves or owns. This determination involves both geospatial location and the state of the real estate, which is critical in ISKI’s role as the water supplier for all of Istanbul.

Another objective of this project was to provide access to all of ISKI’s land registry information, including graphical information, through a simple, user-friendly interface developed during this project. Additional information about some of ISKI’s facilities was gathered in this project, and those facilities were also integrated into the GIS. All this information will be used in ISKI’s Land Registry department, as well as by other departments that need easy access to the information.

ISKI developed a cadastral system called ISEMBIS that delivers up-to-date real estate data for all the land parcels it serves or owns. ISEMBIS streamlines the retrieval of land registry data, turning what had been a time-consuming, labor-intensive process into a highly efficient, automated system. Since both the CAD and GIS technology needed to reside on the same platform, the ISKI team selected MicroStation-based Bentley Map to provide this functionality.

Today the new system houses thousands of photogrammetric images, cadastral maps, and digitized data from legacy paper files. ISKI used the Geospatial Administrator capability in Bentley Map with its XML Feature Modeling (XFM) technology to standardize the annotation and symbolization of objects across the enterprise.

One of the main challenges of the project was obtaining the necessary information from land registry offices, particularly because of the confidential nature of the information. Data was also obtained by aerial survey, although bad weather occasionally hampered those efforts. A third source of land information was hard-copy documentation held by ISKI, although many documents had been misplaced or were duplicates. As part of the project, hard-copy information was digitized and entered into the GIS system.

ISKI personnel, along with staff members of other city departments who regularly access ISKI land parcel information, are all benefiting from the new system’s improved efficiency. The time required to process and fulfill requests for land registry information has dropped from eight hours to as little as 30 minutes, which has led to substantial improvements in efficiency in handling the more than 2,000 land registry requests received each year. ISKI estimates that the total time savings in a year amount to almost 17,000 hours per year, freeing up ISKI staff to perform other tasks.

Other benefits include reduced official correspondence to acquire data, better collaboration among departments, and less production and handling of hard-copy versions of data. Much of the previous expense came from making blueprints and making photocopies of land registry and information stored in folders. After the ISEMBIS project implementation, 80 percent of those expenses have been saved, especially when the time savings are taken into account.

Commenting on the project, Mehmet Zeki Imamoglu, manager of the ISEMBIS project, said, “Implementing our new cadastral system was necessary to facilitate access to all land registry property and graphics through an easy-to-use interface. Our ISEMBIS project makes obtaining quick and accurate information about our land assets easier for our 650 technicians and engineers. We are extremely excited to be a part of the first XFM technology-driven project in Turkey, and our use of Bentley software was the key to its success.”

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