260 cities build digital geo-systems

BEIJING - More than 260 prefecture-level Chinese cities are building digital geographic systems to provide better services to citizens, the National Administration of Surveying, Mapping and Geoinformation (NASMG) said on Wednesday.

The NASMG said in a statement that over 100 of those cities have put their systems into full operation, including Taiyuan and Jincheng in Shanxi province, Huizhou and Foshan in Guangdong province, Yantai and Weihai in Shandong province.

In the meantime, about 10 lower-level counties have also finished the construction of digital geographic systems.

The digitalization of cities has become an important instrument for the government's decision making, and also helped improve citizens' quality of life, the NASMG explained.

The statement said the country will build a digital geographic framework of China by 2015.

It said the NASMG will choose some cities with well-developed digital geographic systems as pilot sites to build "smart cities," referring to urban centers administered with intelligent technology such as cloud computing.