Muscat: Even in today’s era of Google Maps, finding an exact apartment can be a challenge in the country and the government has announced new measures to address this issue.
The Minister of Housing and Urban Planning (MUHP) has issued a decision 200/2024 for regulating the addressing system in the Sultanate of Oman, which will include a geographic description to identify the location of a specific place.
The regulations will cover naming and numbering neighborhoods, streets, roads, public squares, residences, and facilities.
It will be prohibited to change or modify the use of the approved address data.
A property owner will be obligated to place address plates on buildings, residential or commercial complexes, and their internal units.
The decision stated that the Ministry shall establish an intelligent and advanced addressing system, and for this purpose, it may develop a General Unified Addressing System in the governorates.
The basic elements should consist of the governorate's name, the wilayat's name, the street's name, and the unit number.
The sub-elements should include the city name - village name - neighborhood name.
The Ministry will be responsible for establishing a central national database related to address, and each governorate must provide the Ministry with this data continuously through the available databases.
The Ministry is responsible for managing the central national database related to addressing, and for this purpose, it will develop a classification for the central national database - as open and classified data, maintain data security, and ensure the accuracy of data received from the governorates.
It will also determine fees for using the classified addressing system data after the approval of the Ministry of Finance.
The governorate shall implement the addressing in coordination with the competent municipality and ensure that the data is updated in the event of changing the address or creating a new address, determining and assigning the approved names for streets, if they are distinctive in the state, and writing names in Arabic.
When writing names in Latin letters, care must be taken to transcribe them literally and alphabetically from the Arabic language according to the mechanism prepared by the concerned authority.
It should consider the integration of addressing requests with the governorate’s database for the addressing system, notifying the address unit owner of the address, whether there is a change in the address or not, and it is considered.
The address is official after the governorate creates the addressing data in its database.
Benefits
The Unified Addressing System will facilitate the delivery of emergency services such as ambulance and civil defense, assist the supply of postal and telephone services, and electricity and water invoices, save time to reach the intended destination, address proof in official records like; ID cards, residence permits, driving licenses and help in the planning and decision-making process related to urban expansion.a
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