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Many government agencies in Qatar have document storage rooms overflowing with project drawings, maps, and photographs. Engineers often have a need to view these documents as a reference for current and future projects. The naming convention for past projects is not always consistent and it often takes several hours to find the relevant drawing. In addition, drawings can be misplaced or in such bad condition that they are unusable.
Recognizing a growing need among most of the country's government agencies to provide better access to its document repositories, the Centre for GIS's Technology Development Services (TDS) department set about to design a generic software product for document indexing that could be easily implemented by any agency.
After several months of performing user needs analyses and testing product functionality, TDS has released its Spatial Index for Document Encoding and Retrieval (SPIDER), a high-speed, high-quality document storage and retrieval software product.
SPIDER provides a spatial link to scanned drawings that have been archived by including a "live" map link to all documents. A set of national maps have been overlaid with project boundaries so that anyone interested in reviewing past documents can easily display a project area on their computer and then examine any related documents by touching the project boundaries with the computer's cursor.
Users can also use a tabular index search to locate the required documents. To facilitate the search, each document is cross-referenced in a number of ways including the type of drawing, project number, project title, drawing number, etc. A special indexing feature flags documents that are not yet available in digital form and indicates to the user where a hardcopy version of the document can be found.
SPIDER can be used to access a wide variety of documents stored in digital format, including engineering drawings (As Built and Standard), project drawings, maps, and photographs.
Viewing options include both the selection of a full view of a document or a customized view using panning and zooming functions. Selected documents can either be printed on A0, A1, A2, or A3 size paper or downloaded.