The Government of the Kingdom of Morocco and the Government of the United States of America, acting through the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), signed in 2007 a Compact Millennium Challenge Account  in order to contribute to the poverty reduction through the economic growth in Morocco. In this context the Directorate of Strategy and Statistics (DSS) of the Moroccan Ministry of Agriculture and Marine Fisheries called for the realization of a Geographic Information System based on the Web.

Planetek Italia has then been awarded this important project whose aim is to facilitate  the access to the information related to the Millenium Challenge Account projects regarding fruit trees production, small scale fisheries, functional literacy and vocational training, and business support . The aim of this project is also the integration of the existing geographical information systems, in order to improve the capitalization and the coherence of all existing information, to improve the performance monitoring of MCA-Morocco projects and, last but not least, to improve the quality and organization of information sharing, the technical data analysis, the mapping and the spatial data analysis.

The GIS application developed is both an intranet and extranet application that allows various users both of the DSS of the Moroccan Ministry of Agriculture, and the Direction of Monitoring & Evaluation of the Moroccan Agency of Partnership for Progress (APP), to quick and easy access to data and statistical information available on the servers of the Ministry or the APP. The solution implemented is a Spatial Data Infrastructure based on the Web that guarantees the deployment and use of GIS tools and data throughout the Department and the APP, the integration with other information systems, using standard software interfaces and methods, the centralized hosting of critical GIS functions that are this way accessible to many users inside the organization, the distributed GIS processing capabilities (such as analyzing and managing distributed GIS data) and the delivery via the Internet of comprehensive GIS functionalities.
To accommodate the cooperative process involving multiple parties, public and private, with very diverse skills and knowledge, Planetek Italia has promoted the adoption of the Design Thinking methodology in all the phases of the project.

The Geoportal

The objective of the project, founded by the MCA cooperation program, is the reengineering and rethinking of the current structure of the wide collection of datasets owned by the Ministère de l'Agriculture et de la Pêche Maritime (MAPM) and its technical partners (DSS, APP, and others), and further to design also a new publishing and storage architecture, with a more centralized and optimized solution.

The project, organized in three iterative steps, with two prototypes, within 12 months, has planned activities of requirement analysis, design of a new geospatial platform and a new geospatial data-model, furthermore development of a simple-use and open web geoportal that will allow internal and external (public) users to easily access agricultural and fishing metadata of the Morocco territory. The collection of Rasters, Vectors and documental files already owned by the Ministry and its partners, has been then reorganized, in order to be easily integrated in the new web architecture. At data level the main need has been to analyze and re-design a new integrated centralized and optimized geodatabase, having coherent information stored.

The Web platform is deployed in a simple architecture with two servers. An application server hosts the following software components: ESRI ArcGIS Server 10 including Image and data interoperability extensions, ESRI Geoportal 1.2.2 (an open source platform), and Flex libraries 3.0 for ArcGIS Server for the geonavigation module. The data server hosts ESRI ArcSDE 10 and PostgreSQL 8.4 as DBMS. The database manager  hosts both datasets and metadata sets. Metadata are stored in ISO 19115, and ISO 19115-2 format.

The geoportal administrator is enabled to manage contents and user permissions at geoportal level.  Furthermore users, at base level, are able to access functionalities as metadata discovery, maps navigation with pan/zoom, advanced printing, and geographic queries. After the logging in, at more deep level, depending on the authorizations, the internal user is able to download maps on his web client, temporary or permanently upload maps, create new maps merging them with other maps, editing via web the feature classes of the map.