GMV provides Portugal’s police with a centralized digital arms archive

In liaison with the Information Systems Cabinet (Gabinete de Sistemas de Informação: GSI) GMV has implemented the project called Weapons and Owners Digital Information Repository (Repositório de Informação Digital sobre Armas e Proprietários: RIDAP) for the Public Security Police (Polícia de Segurança Pública: PSP), in particular for the Arms and Explosives Department (Departamento de Armas e Explosivos: DAE).

PSP runs an archive containing more than one million paper files with information on the weapons and owners cadaster. This frequently sought information was previously unavailable on the current weapons and explosives information management system, SIGAE (Sistema Integrado de Gestão de Armas e Explosivos). The fact that these files only existed in paper format caused any access to this information to be slow and unwieldy, with a significant knock-on impact on any PSP activities that needed it.

With the RIDAP project, which is integrated into PSP’s global administrative modernization strategy, PSP managed to address the main objective of having this archive indexed in a digital format, accessible not only through a simple but effective web interface, but also through an API that allows a straightforward integration with other existing information systems, in particular SEI (Sistema Estratégico de Informação) and the aforementioned SIGAE.

Project implementation took up the last semester of 2016 and the first quarter of 2017 and consisted of two main phases: i) digitalization and indexing of the paper files on weapons and owners; ii) software development, where both the web interface and the API were implemented.

An Agile approach was used as the project management methodology. This ensured excellent coordination between PSP and GMV project teams and made a decisive contribution towards the success of the project.