Working for MoG, more about the project!
If you from more advanced country it’s simple to send mail because there is a system for addressing, but this is not the case about Gaza and this one of the reasons that the mail never works in Gaza. Therefore, Municipality of Gaza (MoG) started a project funded by the world bank to make system for addressing. The idea is very simple, just give a number to each street and a number for each building on that street. By this way each building will have unique address by the pair (BuildingNo, StreetNo). But implementing this on the ground it not easy as paper. It consumes large human resources because Gaza is old city and it not very well designed city and in many cases people working on that project spend days just thinking how normalize special cases that arise. But this only one part of the project.
My project was the second part of the project. Since every building must have at least one construction permit this mean that each (BuildingNo, StreetNo) pair must point to one or more construction permits. One or more because the building can be built in different phases and each phase must have separate construction permit.
MoG have big old archive of construction permits. This archive contain permits since 1910s but this archive is paper based and no computer records about it. We are now in 2009 and MoG still have no computer system for construction permits all is done manually.
My boss give me a three simple tasks:
1- Get the important data from the paper archive to computer database.
2-Match each construction permit to (BuildingNo, StreetNo).
3-Build new computer based system for future construction permit where each construction permit will automatically attached to (BuildingNo, StreetNo).
These tasks seems very concise and simple!
Next time I will talk more about the nature of the problem and the approaches I took to solve it.
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