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transform Dubai into the world’s smart-
est city.”
Sheikh Hamdan continued saying,
“We always focus on offering in-
novative solutions that achieve the
happiness of the people, residents
and visitors alike, and are closely
connected to their day-to-day life and
how to make it easier. Since the
initiative to turn Dubai into a
smart city was announced, the world has
been closely watching Dubai’s experience
to turn it into a benchmark”.
“It takes more than development of smart
applications and services to transform into
a smart city. It also needs a drastic change
in procedures, data transfer mechanism
and top-of-the-line digital infrastructure,”
he added.
Sheikh Hamdan noted that a smart geo-
graphic address system is key for Dubai,
a city visited by over 10 million tourists a
year and which hosts residents of over
200 different nationalities.
His Highness pointed out that the released
Makani location app is not merely another
mobile app to be added to the mGov apps,
but it is a smart addresses system that is
the first of its kind in the world. Its imple-
mentation will have economic and envi-
ronmental impact on the emirate by re-
ducing trip time for various vehicles inside
the emirate to reach their destination ac-
curately thus reducing carbon emissions.
He mentioned that the app has taken into
account the diverse cultures and nation-
alities in the emirate, thus dealing only in
numbers rather than letters and names
that have different spellings and pronun-
ciations from one language to another.
Sheikh Hamdan issued directives to the
Dubai Municipality to complete the 10-dig-
it signs for Dubai buildings and access
points in six months. He said it is impor-
tant for various entities and free zones to
cooperate with the Municipality to achieve
that.
The GIS Department at Dubai Municipal-
ity developed this smart and unique sys-
tem that locates entrances to buildings
and establishments of all types in Dubai to
an accuracy of a meter square. The sys-
tem uses ten numbers based directly on
a global satellite coordinate system. The
system relies on the language of num-
11
May
2015