The Supreme Court has ordered the provisional suspension of a disputed contract with a subsidiary of Finmeccanica to install a digital mapping system.
The Supreme Court justified the provisional suspension as being "... in order to avoid the effects of the contract causing 'serious and impossible to repair damage to the community as it may affect the heritage of the Panamanian nation because of the delay in the decision on its merits that could be made by this court. '"
By the end of 2012 the country expects to have a new system in place to enable access to a database of cartographic information.
The project will be carried out in stages with information on 32 cantons by 2010 and 56 by December 2012. To obtain information on Costa Rica's full 81 cantons will require the negotiation of further credit.
In the official maps, "for any property it will be possible to see the water mains network, electrical connections, whether or not it is affected by regulatory plans, if it is part of a state-owned area and all other information generated by organisations that manage the national territory," reports Nacion.com.
The country’s geographic institute will invest $3 million in digitalizing its cartographic information.
The modernization of Panama’s national mapping data is part of a project begun two years ago called the National Geographic Information System (Signal).
Israel Sánchez, director of the geographic institute, commented that the new system will enable the country’s cartographic data to be accessed via a web interface.
Authorities are looking for companies capable of supplying and installing a $1.6 million satellite geodetic network.
The system will include 16 Reference Stations, double frequency and all the required hardware and software to supply real time information. The stations must record 1 second intervals, to be used in post-processing for geodesic and topographic uses.