Geoportal Oman: putting the country's spatial data in one place
Ministry of Housing and Urban Planning · Sultanate of Oman · in progress
The requirement
Spatial data in any country tends to live in the department that collected it. Planning holds one layer, utilities hold another, municipalities hold a third, and nobody can see the whole picture at once. A geoportal is the answer to that: one place where the layers are published, described and served, so a planner, a utility engineer and a private developer are all working from the same map.
How the project is structured
The contract runs as seven staged deliverables, each signed off before the next begins.
- Kickoff and advance paymentcontract signed by both parties, kickoff meeting held
- Analysis and assessmentStakeholder Requirements Document, System Requirements Specification, geodatabase design, data model and data matrix
- Design and developmentsystem design document, architecture and data flow diagrams, security architecture, user interface approval, core user management module operational
- Geodatabase and integrationproduction geodatabase configured, QA/QC tools implemented, API and ETL integration and data validation in place
- User acceptance testingtest plan and cases, performance testing at 300 to 600 concurrent users, penetration and security testing, Ministry sign-off, system ready to go live
- Training and documentationhands-on training for all user groups, the full documentation set in Arabic and English, disaster recovery plan and source code handover
- Go-Live and SLAsystem launched on Ministry servers, three-month trial run, post-launch report, then a monthly-reported service level agreement for ongoing maintenance
An AI layer that stays on the Ministry's own infrastructure
The geoportal includes an AI assistant, built on an open-source model and hosted on the Ministry's own premises rather than run through an external cloud provider. Keeping the deployment on site means Ministry data never has to leave Ministry infrastructure, and the model can keep learning from real use of the system, improving in place rather than depending on updates from an outside vendor.
The ministry that asked TGO to structure the cadastral database in 2002 is the ministry building the national geoportal with them now.
Why it matters
Live work matters more than finished work when a client is deciding who to hire. This is the current flagship: a national platform, in progress, for a ministry that has been coming back for 23 years, delivered against a staged plan that ties every payment to a signed-off milestone rather than to time on the clock.
