Mapping the country for the national census
Ministry of National Economy · Sultanate of Oman · 2008 to 2010
The requirement
A census counts people where they live, which means somebody first has to establish where they live. Enumeration areas have to be drawn so that every building falls inside exactly one of them, with no gaps and no overlaps, and the boundaries have to be things a field enumerator can actually recognise on the ground.
What TGO did
- Creation of the geospatial database from satellite imagery
- Interpretation of imagery into the built features the census needed to be counted against
- 2 years of work delivered ahead of the enumeration itself
A census map has no tolerance for a missed building. The requirement is not high accuracy. It is complete coverage.
Why it matters
Census work is the clearest test of whether a mapping contractor can be complete rather than merely accurate, because the client can check. It is also national statistical infrastructure: the population figures Oman planned against for the following decade rest on the mapping underneath them.
