A decision support system for local administration in GIS
environment - A study at Paramakudi Taluk of
Ramanathapuram district, Tamil Nadu


Quality checking was done over the theme vectorization. Error correction, topology formation and map join process were executed in Workstation ARC/INFO 8.0.2. to finally create one map, mosaic of comprising 93 revenue villages and associated themes of Paramakudi taluk. Map joining process was conducted for every theme mentioned separately.

Simultaneously, Attribute data were collected from various government departments at Ramanathapuram. These include:
  • Union / Taluk Name
  • General Population
  • SC / ST Population
  • Health Centre details
  • Fair-price shop details
  • Elementary School details
These were edited and suitably formatted in Foxpro and linked with map database. Details about each hamlet of a village are included as attribute data.

Data Analysis
Before incorporating themes and data to ARC/VIEW GIS environment for the development of DSS using AVENUE script, certain spatial operations were conducted under two categories. Default data were generated during topology formation. For example, polygon area in square kilometer was generated and if for a line, the length of the line was calculated.

The other part of the analysis involves overlaying technique. In order to find out number of round wells occurring in a particular village, well theme was overlaid with village boundary theme and village wise STATISTICS were generated in ARC/INFO. For a line theme such as road map, this was overlaid with the village map so that, the length of each minor and major road was calculated. Accordingly, similar spatial operations were performed wherever necessary.

After performing spatial operations, coverages were converted into shape file format and attribute database was also transferred along with shape files. These were finally used for development of Decision Support System (DSS) in ARC/VIEW GIS using AVENUE script.

Development of Decision Support System (DSS)
Decision Support System (DSS) comprises five major modules as below.
  • Data Display
  • Attribute Display
  • Query Builder
  • Model Builder
  • History
Apart from the above modules, provisions were also made available to update attribute data, hard copy print out, etc.

Data Display
This module developed to give a comprehensive look of the features in the study area, allows the user to selectively view the themes with their sub-category and tabular data simultaneously. The cursor position in the tabular data is highlighted on the map. This particular provision is available not only to each entity, but also to Union wise and to Taluk wise entities. In the tabular format, additional information about the selected feature is displayed (Fig. 3)



Figure 3


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