Introduction
Planning is now a widely accepted way to handle complex problems of resource allocation and decision-making. It involves the use of collective intelligence and foresight to chart direction, order, harmony and progress in public activity relating to human environment and general welfare. In order to provide a more effective and meaningful direction for better planning and development, necessary support of the organization has become essential. Hence the need for a suitable information system is increasingly being felt in all planning and developmental activities, whether these are for urban or rural areas. The position with regard to information system in urban areas however is far from satisfactory. Large volume of data is gathered whenever preparation of physical plan is taken up and a good number of maps as a part of the exercise on plan formulation are also prepared. However, today no system has been built to compile this geographically referenced data on a systematic manner and store them for retrieval at a subsequent point of time.
Planners and decision-makers at Microlevel have to depend upon spatial and non-spatial data for optimal interpretation. Hence, the planners need to have at their disposal sophisticated data management systems to handle such spatially correlated data.
The emergence of Remote Sensing and Geographic Information System as a powerful tool for spatial analysis and storage has in effect alleviated the problem by computerization of the spatial data. This new technology can reduce the time and cost to the planners in organizing the data in arriving at precise conclusion and decisions.
Here an attempt is made wherein ArcView3.1 GIS is used to develop an information system which can support the planners in information retrieval by integrating the spatial and aspatial data.
Objective
The primary objective of the study was to develop a Support System focussing on the following lines
- Maintain Natural Resource database of the region
- Maintain a detail Socio-economic data base of the region
- Suggest Land Resource Action plan
- Maintain a database on detailed soil information of the region
- A user interactive
module for broad-based information retrieval and
query on natural and aspatial database.
Materials & Methods
Study Area
The study area considered was Naranapuram village of Annur Block occupying the western part of Avinashi taluk in Coimbatore district.
Data used
Thematic maps Soil, Landuse, Slope, Geomorphology, Drainage, Land parcel boundary and Road network was used as the primary natural resource database for the village. The detailed soil resources of Annur block was used for design of Soil Information system. Socio-economic data namely Population detail, Health centers, Employment details, Industry details and associated data where collected from field survey.
The thematic maps were digitally entered into the geographic database in the vector format and the data were partitioned into two components (i) Spatial data representing the distribution of features in each physiographic unit and (ii) attribute database representing the socio-economic data. The soil map of the village was digitized manually in Arc/Info, and the associated attribute data were input as info database through keyboard entry. The database forms the base upon which the Information system was designed and is capable of suggesting:
- Land resource development plan using Expert system approach, Fuzzy approach and query shell approach
- Land capability classification, Land irrigability classification, Crop suitability, Erodability, Co-efficient of Improvement using the Soil information module of the information system
- Suggest sites suitable for percolation ponds
- Suggest sites suitable for public utilities centers
- Database queries on
Natural and Aspatial data
Design of the Information System
Basically the Information system is designed into 3 modules and the users can select the bounds from the main menu.
Module 1
Module 1 is for land resource action plan of the village and the user is requested to make his choice of either Experts approach, Fuzzy approach or Query shell approach.
In experts approach the action plan is generated by correlating the various conditions of landform, slope and soil which suits a particular practice was formulated in consultation with experts in respective fields and hence the knowledge base (stored as a text file) was appropriately coded in Avenue to generate the action plan for the area. Provisions to generate the relevant statistics before and after the action plan is provided and can also be charted to study the variations.(Slide 2 of Powerpoint presentation attached depicts the sample output of expert approach for land suitability assessment)
In fuzzy approach for land suitability analysis, membership grades were assigned to the existing criteria (namely Geomorpology, Landuse, Soil, Slope) which determines the suitability. This model of fuzzy approach solves many problems where we want all the criteria to contribute something to the final model solution. This model is based upon the geographic conditions existing in the area and the degree of compatibility of the condition with the said suitability. In other words the conditions existing has a degree of fuzziness associated with it. Fuzzy set for the criteria was developed by assigning membership grades for suitability's Agriculture, Agro-horticulture, Silvipasture, Dry farming and Fodder and fuel plantation. The model maps the suitability of individual criteria to an intermediate suitability measuring fuzzy set. The result of this mapping is a scalar value from the domain of the suitability metric indicating the degree of suitability for the particular model factor.