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Developing Health Geographic Information Systems For Khorasan Province In Iran



System Architecture of the K-HGIS plan
Enterprise GIS was considered for health service and management in Khorasan province. The main structure of the K-HGIS a Content Management Systems (CMS) to construct network accessibility to the health databases and also to the maps and related attribute data.

The architecture of the system is based on Content Management System (CMS). Some benefits of web based CMS applications are as following:
  • Allows non-technical users to easily update the web
  • Ensuring that users not gain access to secure areas
  • Monitoring updates prior to publishing
  • Remaining up to date for the web content
  • Allowing users to customize viewing contents with their own favorite
  • Presenting the web in the local language
  • Ability to add your plugging to the system when needed, and the system will detect and enables them automatically
In the above CMS, there are three main branches that we worked on them:
  • Spatial data preparing
  • feature attribute data preparing
  • processing and management and spatially relating of the feature attribute databases.
The CMS details, which have used for K-HGIS, are shown in table 1.

Table 1. Details of the CMS designed for the K-HGIS:
Portal SystemTheme support
Customizable view
Multiple language support
Security Control SystemSession management
Log file management
Page access controls
User Management SystemUser management
Group management
Page access controls
Database Management SystemDatabase connections
Database queries
XML convert
Document Management SystemArchive documents
Search documents
Report document
Report Management SystemReporting with different views
Exporting reports to custom file types

However, Preparing thematic maps and related attribute data is the main problem in establishing enterprise GIS. This is more difficult task in developing countries (Sanaei-Nejad, 2002) and become more problematic when the enterprise GIS is for health service and management. Maps and spatial data sources, traditionally, are not used in this section. There are limited map sources available in other governmental organization that can be used as basically thematic maps for HGIS, in Khorasan province. Some other maps should have been prepared by fieldwork using GPS and also address matching procedure.


Figure 1. Selecting digitizing procedure



Figure 2. Digitizing procedure planned for preparing maps for K-HGIS

The base maps, which are used for this project, are topographic maps, administrative maps, Roads maps, rural, and urban points. These maps were collected and digitized appropriately. Selecting a digitizing procedure needed some considerations (Figure 1).

The most Convenience method that we could have planned based on the above consideration is shown in a flowchart (Figure 2).

The structure of traditional databases in the health service and management of Khorasan were analyzed. The analyses showed that the number of fields in the data bases are very high, which organized into different relational tables, but the architecture of the data bases are very simple. Figure 3 shows a sample of the database.




Figure 3. A sample of traditional databases in the health service and management of Khorasan

There are some rules that have to be considered in defining the fields and their attributes in the data bas. The traditional databases are static and update procedure is time consuming and also bureaucratically complicate. The new database

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