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Abstract
Web GIS for Tamil Nadu Using FOSS
Mahalakshmi Narayanan
Senior Systems Analyst
National Informatics Centre, Tamil Nadu State Centre,
Email: tngis@tn.nic.in
Geographic Information System (GIS) has become a widespread phenomenon in the Government sector spatially enabling administrators and planners to make sound decisions on their various day to day activities. GIS is an indispensable decision support system for managing and analyzing both spatial and non-spatial data. Advent of web technologies and advancement in networks has made it possible to integrate stand-alone Management Information Systems (MIS) so that data in one system can be related to the other. This has also enabled today the E-Governance by the Government bodies by extending its services to the citizens in an easily accessible manner.
The growth of Open Source software in the GIS arena has been commendable. The availability of the source code and the right to modify enables unlimited tuning and improvement of software, especially in the Government scenario. The right to redistribute and reuse these modifications and improvements to the code enables sharing among large communities. Use of open source software would not only ensure fast growth of GIS community but also cost effective GIS solutions to the user community.
National Informatics Centre, Tamil Nadu State Centre (NIC, TNSC) has been a user of Free and Open Source GIS Software and some of the popular FOSS GIS tools used are:
1. UMN MapServer as GIS Server
2. PostgreSQL/PostGIS server as Backend Database
3. PHP/MapScript for Server side scripting language
4. OpenJUMP, QGIS, etc. as desktop client GIS tools
Some of the websites designed, developed and hosted in NIC Servers using FOSS GIS software are as follows:
1.http://tnmaps.tn.nic.in
The website provides administrative divisions of entire Tamil Nadu as spatial and non-spatial data. Provides interface to create, customize and draw dynamic maps.
2. http://tnmaps.tn.nic.in/tamil
The website provides access to administrative maps of Tamil Nadu with vernacular language interface in Tamil.
3. http://www.census.tn.nic.in/map
Census of Tamil Nadu is a comprehensive website with complete information of Tamil Nadu demographic and socio-economic data. The Census website enables dynamic query shells with which user may select what is required and the region of interest to view the data in tabular form, chart form or map form on Census 2001 data. Thematic Maps enable online classification of spatial data as thematic maps based on user selectable parameter, table, field, ranges, classes, legends and colours. Query Map displays non-spatial attribute data based on a spatial query by clicking on the map. Build Query retrieves spatial data based on query built with non-spatial attributes. Browse Map provides flexibility in user-selectable layers on/off, colours customization, etc.
4. http://www.animaldiseaseinfo.tn.nic.in
The website developed for Veterinary Epidemiology & Preventive Medicine Department, Tamil Nadu Veterinary and Animal Sciences University, attempts to spatially project the Animal Disease Outbreak pattern.
The technical details and the open source software used are presented in this paper
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