KEO International Consultants’ South of Shamkha housing development will provide self-sustaining regional neighborhoods for over 115,000 residents near Abu Dhabi Island in the United Arab Emirates. The award-winning South of Shamkha master plan emphasizes clean, sustainable living and pedestrian-friendly access to parks and district centers.

In order to provide prospective residents with information on individual plots within this 10,000 parcel site, it was necessary to provide an automated method for creating easily distributable data sheets from the CAD-based site plan data.

Working with KEO International Consultants, Daniel Weinbach and Partners, and Okrent Associates, Great Arc created a custom solution that leveraged existing CAD-based design data in a GIS environment in order to quickly produce Adobe PDF-based data sheets for each of the more than 10,000 villa plots in the South of Shamkha development.

Great Arc integrated the CAD design data into a file geodatabase. Using available tools in Autodesk Map 2008 and ArcMap, Great Arc created and verified polygon topology for the plots and assigned unique names to each plot.

Great Arc’s custom application provides a custom PDF view of each individual villa plot, displaying the dimensions of the plot sides and the distance from the street centerline along the plot’s location within a neighborhood overview locator map. An overview map and a location map are automatically created, formatted, and placed on the PDF map book layout. Additionally, the application creates feature-linked annotation and distance-to-centerline data for each villa plot, which is provided in a file geodatabase format for inclusion in the master GIS database.