Qatar had adopted a property identification system named Qatar Area Referencing System (QARS) several years ago. It was primarily implemented to aid in the development of detailed area planning and addressing. The 10 digits number identifying a building was made by combining the zone number, the street number and the building number. Utilities agencies /companies like Electricity, Water and Telecommunications were placing their own identification numbers on buildings for their daily routine activities. Consequently there was redundancy of work, no uniformity, inconsistency, less efficiency, wastage of resources, no integration between QARS number.

At the same time, the urban areas in Qatar were rapidly expanding and urban planning regulations were changing in order to cope up with the country?s development. The updated urban planning regulations were not being taken into consideration throughout the property issuance process which lead to an inconsistent and confusing property numbers to both government agencies and citizens alike.

The National Committee for the Coordination of Infrastructure Public Services has called upon CGIS's expertise and technical capabilities to review the current policy and system of issuing QARS numbers and the property numbering plates in terms of design and elements. In order to cater for the planning requirements as well as coming up with a geo-coding system, CGIS took up this task and discussed the issue with other concerned agencies in detail to have a common property number in Qatar. After an agreement was reached with agencies, CGIS planned and designed such a system that creates a comprehensive database to serve the requirements of all concerned agencies in Qatar by using GIS to link a QARS number with its geographic location and the numbers from other agencies. 

The methodology followed by CGIS was to start by conducting a field survey of existing properties zone-by-zone where surveyors collect electricity, water and QTEL numbers indicating whether the location is a vacant land, a building under construction or an existing structure and define its type and main entrance location. This process was started using manual paper recording and currently, CGIS is switching to using Differential GPS-equipped hand held devices running mapping software and taking advantage of the new GNSS network established for sub-meter accuracy in locating building entrance.
The next step in the project's methodology is transferring collected data to a point feature layer that was created in Qatar's Topographic Geo-database. An office team issues a new building number based on field survey data and according to the reference guide CGIS had compiled for issuing numbers in accordance with the updated planning regulations. The location of QARS point is moved to the most suitable spot for the number plate to be fixed according to survey team's comments. This process is conducted by an office team at CGIS using GIS tools.

The project had already created a great deal of enthusiasm and potential for a wide range of practical applications in Qatar. Applications that will take advantage of the wealth of information resulting from the QARS project include municipalities, water, electricity, drainage, telecommunications, emergency, census, education, postal and delivery services.

CGIS had developed an intranet application that makes the results of this project available through GISnet to all agencies. This application is being tailor customized and enhanced to cater for specific requirements from those agencies. Also, CGIS's web mapping application "Explore Qatar" now supports for searching property numbers of both new and old (existing) numbers and CGIS is calling upon all organization and companies who obtained data having the old property numbers to approach CGIS to receive the new property numbers data so their services wouldn't be disturbed as a result of having inaccurate data.

As for buildings that are completed during or after the project is finished, HE the Minister of Municipality & Urban Planning issued a requisite to all municipalities to send CGIS a monthly report of building completion certificates so new numbers will be issued and new plates installed for those buildings.

Building number plates installation is expected to be completed within 12 to 18 months then the next stage of numbering and installing plates for internal units whether they are apartments, offices or shops will start. Details of the this stage will be announced in due time.

CGIS is calling upon all citizens and residents to cooperate with the installation teams and assist in controlling the rare cases of vandalism since this project aims at providing better services to everybody in the first place. For more information, please call one of the following numbers: 4955575, 4955574, 4955208.