A GIS-based decision support system for the management of the Moroccan habous property

The habous institution is playing a considerable religious and socio-economic role in the history of Morocco. Thanks to the revenues derived from habous property, the country was able to acquire numerous social and religious facilities. These resources financed the construction of several mosques and medersas, and ensured the functioning of numerous charitable and general utility works. The habous property is vast and heterogeneous in terms of typologies and functions, it includes agricultural land, urban land plots, and also buildings, a substantial number of which has a heritage value. However, data concerning habous land and real estate is scarce. There are no precise, general and easily consultable databases that bring together data relating to this heritage and enable decision-makers to understand its potential and the way in which this potential can be optimized. In this perspective, several researches have been interested in the elaboration of geographic information systems for the management of land and real estate assets, except that no work has approached such a rich, diversified and heterogeneous heritage as the habous heritage, nor has it presented a complete framework ensuring an extensive characterization of the real estate assets, taking into account the different states of the land: agricultural, serviced or built, the natural, regulatory and patrimonial context of the assets, as well as their technical and functional aspects. To overcome this deficiency, we have designed our own database and we have forged our own classification and coding tools based on an approach that constantly relates different scales of observation and investigation to grasp the complexity and importance of the habous heritage, and explore areas of its development. In this work we have built a Geographic Information System (GIS), composed of a database connected to QGIS and GIS Web in order to store, manage and visualize data related to the habous heritage. The whole infrastructure has been developed and implemented using open-source software. Tests to evaluate the efficiency and the relevance of the results of our information system have been carried out. We tried to show how this system could, from the interpretation and the interrogation of the collected data, be a decision support tool in the management of the habous property.