Information technology services provider Automated Systems Holdings (ASL) has been asked by the Land Registry to plan and implement the digital conversion, storage and printing of land transaction records in Hong Kong.
The HK$22 million project, which the Land Registry calls the CIP (colour imaging of plans) initiative, is expected to be completed in nine months.
Representing one of Hong Kong's most significant digital imaging deals, the project will process about 3.5 million plans with the Land Registry. The department was set up in 1993 to provide registration and search services to support local property transactions.
ASL yesterday formally opened a 12,000-square-foot digital imaging centre at its offices in Sha Tin. The facility is run by 60 ASL staff to support the Land Registry during the contract period.
ASL will use a variety of high-performance, high-speed colour scanners to process the land transaction records, which are expected to come in different sizes and conditions.
The scanners are said to be capable of handling plans smaller than A4 size to plans larger than A0 size, as well as book-bound and fragile older documents.
All plans from the Land Registry will be indexed with a bar code and classified according to size and condition before being digitised. ASL expects to receive about 20,000 plans each day. The bar-code system is intended to track all plans and ensure their return to the Land Registry.
To ensure data protection, the ASL centre has been equipped with high-end application servers, large-capacity storage systems, and uninterrupted power. There is also round-the-clock security and surveillance.
Peter Kuo, ASL's deputy chairman and managing director, said the digital imaging centre was designed to accommodate different working areas - including warehousing, plan classifications, scanning, re-assembly and quality control - to ensure a smooth work flow.
Land Registrar Kim Salkeld, said: 'With the colour plan images stored in CD-Roms, we can offer high-quality colour plan copies to our customers through simple retrieval of these images from our imaging server database.'
For Hong Kong-listed ASL, the CIP project is the latest in a series of local government contracts it has won in recent years.
The ASL Group has been supplying IT equipment and related services to Hong Kong schools since 1999.
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