Abstract | Full Paper | PDF | PPT | Printer friendly format

Page 1 of 4
| Next |

Introduction
The concept of e-governance fits in where public organizations are concerned with efficiency, effectiveness and transparency in their delivery systems. The initiative taken by Public Works Department (PWD), Government of Maharashtra, in this direction has been pioneering and commendable. In association with C-DAC (Centre for Development of Advanced Computing), Pune, India PWD has been successful in bringing about a paradigm shift in the business of governance by leveraging on the opportunities provided by advancements in Information and Communications technology.

Public Works Department (PWD), Government of Maharashtra is the principal governing body for planning, design, construction and maintenance of roads and bridges in the entire state. The state has a road network whose total length exceeds 0.2 million km. The system of archival of road data prevalent in PWD was through traditional paper road maps, engineering drawings and road statistics registers. Voluminous and scattered data, maps in different formats and scales, difficulty in accessing the statistical information of a map feature etc. were some of the irritants in the prevalent system. A need was increasingly felt in the department to have a more scientific and systematic approach for the archival of maps and retrieval of statistical information.

In this context, the inherent capabilities of the technology offered in a GIS were looked upon as one having a great potential to successfully cater to the specified requirements. A project for utilizing it to develop a Road Information and Management System was conceptualized with the objective of creating a state wide, up-to-date digital database of roads that would induce efficiency and accuracy in monitoring, management, planning and subsequent development of the road network.

System Architecture
The entire system architecture was framed around the two major building blocks of a GIS enabled system: the Spatial and the Non-spatial data.

2.1 Spatial Data
Spatial layers that required to be incorporated into the system were identified and the work of spatial data creation for the state was taken up in collaboration with MRSAC (Maharashtra State Remote Sensing and Application Centre), Nagpur, India. Survey of India (SOI) maps (1:50,000 scale) as base maps along with PWD's traditional taluka and district maps were the source for creating the raw data for the spatial digital database. The task was laborious due to the obsolescence of SOI maps and scale non-conformities of the PWD maps.

Updation of this digitized raw data was carried out with the help of IRS-satellite's Panchromatic (PAN) and Linear Imaging Self-scanning Sensor (LISS III) data to incorporate any changes and new additions in the road network of the SOI maps. The PAN data were georeferenced to Survey of India maps. LISS-III data was suitably enhanced and registered to the PAN data and a hybrid FCC (False Colour Composite of PAN and LISS-III data) was generated highlighting the transport network. Actual ground checks were performed by the PWD field engineers to validate the status of roads, as revealed by the satellite imagery. Collation of maps to a uniform scale base was accomplished while registering it to a common projection system in a GIS. The updated digitized spatial data layers which included road network, administrative boundaries and village points were put into a GIS for further processing that included feature coding and kilometre-wise dynamic segmentation. Finally, the quality checking of the spatial data was done to ensure accuracy. The common boundaries between adjoining districts and talukas were edge-matched and the continuity of the roads was checked across taluka boundaries and district boundaries. Discrepancies were removed by proper editing in order to achieve a seamlessly matched digital database.

2.2 Non-spatial Data
Attributes that required to be attached to the spatial data layers, and were thought of considerable significance while planning and monitoring of the road network, were identified by exhaustive discussions amongst PWD officials and in consultation with C-DAC experts. Client-server enabled application software was subsequently designed and developed using Power Builder as the front-end tool and MS SQL Server as the RDBMS, to facilitate data entry and storage of attributes, respectively.

2.3 Integration of Spatial and Non-spatial Data
A proper integration of spatial data in the GIS and the non-spatial data residing in the RDBMS was achieved in the GIS environment through ODBC (Open Database Connectivity). Care was taken to ensure that the linkage of maps to the attribute database remains dynamic, in the sense, that, whenever there is a change in the attribute database, it gets reflected in the GIS.

GIS interface has been customized with ESRI's Arc View as the base, the customization environment being Avenue with Dialog Designer and Arc View Network Analyst extensions. A comprehensive custom query shell specific to the PWD's requirement, has been built across different property attributes in the attribute database, and incorporated in the menu based graphic user interface.

Page 1 of 4
| Next |