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Web-GIS based urban planning and information system for municipal corporations - A distributed and real-time system for public utility and toen planning
G. K. Tripathy
GIS Manager, Corporate Technology Group
TATA Infotech Ltd., Mumbai
gktripathy@tatainfotech.com
G. K. Tripathy
GIS Manager, Corporate Technology Group
TATA Infotech Ltd., Mumbai
gktripathy@tatainfotech.com
Abstract
Internet has become a competent technology for data communication due to distributing technology of the web servers. The data and maps reach to the thin clients with the minimum system requirements at user end and with the click of a button. Such technology has not only popularised the whole world but has moved scientific body to one step up. Geographers and planners, who use map and related information traditionally to plan and manage, have found Internet technology of much use since it reduces the cost of data management and information distribution to mass usages. With the advent of GIS and Internet technologies, the conventional intricacies to get solutions in time and position have been improved (Tripathy, 2000). Users can combine data and information accessed over the Intranet or Internet with the local data for display, query and analysis. In this paper, a typical example of use of GIS and Internet technology for Municipal Corporation of India has been illustrated with a typical case study where the urban planning and information system is implemented for use. There are two indigenously developed Web-GIS solutions namely PUPIS and DPIS, have been used for automating the day-to-day operations of Nashik Municipal Corporation (NMC). The functioning of all the 11 departments of this corporation has been integrated into a single system using above two solutions.
As of now in India, very few GIS organisations are proud to have implemented such system for Municipal solutions that addresses holistic approaches to solve bunch of Municipal issues based on a client - server architecture. All the three basic modules under this system, Data Entry, Reporting, GIS - based Query, can be accessed from the remote client machines located in corporations’ ward offices using a browser. The only perquisites being that the terminal nodes (Ward Offices) are connected to the server (Head Office) via Internet or Intranet. Data Entry screens are used for entering data related to the various entities related to functional requirements of all the departments. Reports (maintenance) are generated periodically for each department using the report generation facility provided within the system. These reports provide department-wise consolidated information regarding a particular entity for a given period. GIS based query is the most important module of this system since the visualisation of data and maps are the main criteria for planning and decision-making. All in all the system helps to maintain, manage, plan and analyse geographically referenced data on public utilities (water supply, sewerage, electricity) and development planning (town planning, roads and building, estate and land acquisition, accounts, fire, health and sanitation, property taxation, encroachment, garden).
Web-GIS Based Urban Planning and Information System
Introduction
Since the inception of Internet technology, a substantial growth has been registered world wide in the use of this technology. More benefits are likely to come due to improved cost in distributed computing in various application domains that reaches to mass usages. GIS products can be easily distributed to every desktop in an organisation (through the Web server) and to the general public through World Wide Web communications. Due to increased productivity, improved customer satisfaction and reduced cost, Internet GIS (Web-GIS) is gaining more popularity in the GIS users’ choice. User has a choice for any-time any-where access to the geography related information. Distributed computing is a generic term that includes other terms like Internet, Intranet, Extranet, the Web, net-work-centric, and more. The popularity in the use of web-GIS will be multi-folded if the GIS software is mature enough to take into account the points such as, data interoperability between various spatial data formats (Shp, Tab, Dwg, Dgn, Sdf), data warehouse like Oracle8i, easy access and ease of use, network architecture, flexibility to customisation and close integration with standard Web development tools (ESRI, 2000). As hardware manufacturers and technologies change over time and some manufacturers provide better functionality, performance, or communication capabilities as time evolves, the end user should look for the GIS software that supports multiple platforms. It should continue to support a wide variety of hardware platforms and to take full advantage of improvements in hardware, communications, networking, and database functionality, as they become available. Urban Planning and Information System is a web-GIS based application system for the town planners, bureaucrats, corporators and commissioners that is used to automate the day-to-day functioning of all departments and ward offices of Municipal Corporation. Sitting on his desktop and through the browser any authorised user of corporation will be able to get a visual display of all day-to-day queries, maps and maintenance reports.
Fig.1: Multi-tier Architecture of Web-GIS based Urban Planning and Information System
System Architecture
While designing any web-GIS system or solution with the help of client’s requirement, the salient factors those are important to be included are:- functional module, graphic user interface, downloading time, system performance and the cost of the solution. The system must be portable and expandable to accommodate the future changes in hardware, software and networking (Jere, 2000). Keeping in view these factors, the designing of the system has been done using MapInfo suite of products. MapXtreme, a web-GIS product from MapInfo, provides a common platform for the exchange of Web-enabled GIS data and services. MapXtreme has a framework for distributing GIS capabilities over the Internet or Intranet (Hogan, 1999). It uses server-side technologies for data integration with RDBMS and is capable of serving to multiple clients’ request in a minimum response time. It is specifically built to serve GIS on the Internet and Intranet. Typically, the client requests information from an Internet or Intranet server. Then the server processes the request and sends the information back to the client viewer. The MapXtreme server technology has multitier architecture i.e., clients, web server, application server and data server (MapXtreme, 2000).
Urban Planning and Information System is a Web-GIS based application system that amalgamates MapInfo’s MapXtreme server, Oracle8i database server and Microsoft Internet technologies like Active Server Pages (ASP) and Component Object Model (COM). This system shows the spatial and attribute data of map layers. The map features are stored in the MapXtreme server as layers or geosets. These layers are used with the database attributes for visual display of information that is required for urban planning and information system. The system requires Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS 4.0) Web server to host the system and available to the users via web browser (Fig.1). The core constituents of this design are as follows.
ASP Files: These are the Active Server Page files, which contain the presentation logic. VBScript was used for server-side scripting because it is simple, easily maintainable and integrates well with the other Microsoft technologies. Client-side scripting was done using JavaScript because it is a browser-independent scripting language & hence is best suited for client-side scripting.
COM Component: The COM is a DLL written in VB programming language that contains routines to insert, retrieve, delete and modify data into Oraccle8i database. The ASP files use these routines to insert, retrieve, delete and modify the database. The DLL handles multiple transactions to optimize data retrieval.
HTML & CSS File: The HTML file was the basic skeleton of the entire web site. This language was used as this is a static language and it has all the components for the presentation of the Web site. The CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are files those were used to improve and optimize the presentation logic and coding. The various attributes of any object in the HTML is grouped and defined in the style sheet.
GIF File: The GIF files contain the raster images of the maps after converting from vectors. Since GIF files are lighter they are the part of presentation to display the map features. The maps are actually in a vector format (tab files) and are converted to the GIF format by the interfacing layer of MapX (mapping OCX).
The web-GIS based urban planning and information system consists of 2 subsystems PUPIS and DPIS. These subsystems have very much similar architecture and process flow. However, their functionalities are different. PUPIS is useful for utility functionalities like water supply, sewerage operation and electricity networks whereas DPIS is useful for town planning and related departmental activities. Both the subsystems, however, look like a single system from user perspective. The process flow of PUPIS and DPIS are described in Fig.2 and Fig. 3 respectively.
PUPIS (Public Utility Planning and Information System)
DPIS (Development Planning and Information System)
System Configuration
Urban Planning and Information system requires the following minimum configurations.
Hardware and Software Requirements
Through this system, users will be able to query and locate plots, roads, subdivisions, layout, encroached land, mosquito breeding place, water and sewerage pipelines, electric poles and other geographic features of interest, as well as view information about them, and create maps on-screen or to print. You can turn map layers “on” or “off,” depending upon your needs. Also, some of these layers are scale-dependent and can only be viewed when you are zoomed in far enough. The functional and technical benefits are as follows.
Functional
Fig. 5: Urban Planning and Information System
System Implementation
The Study Area
Burgeoning Information Technology sector has forced Municipal Corporations throughout the world to improve their day-to-day functions and services. Best usages are often in the areas of town planning, utility management, socio-economic planning, infokiosk and property taxation. Mostly their planning and functioning are common and similar. Therefore, the potential of introducing Internet and Intranet based IT solutions are huge and repetitive in nature. Sensing this is a prospect, TATA Infotech studied systematically and scientifically operations of few municipal corporations in India. Through such studies TATA Infotech has developed packaged solutions with the state-of-art technologies GIS, Web and RDBMS to utility planning (PUPIS) and town planning (DPIS). These packaged solutions can be implemented in client-server architecture using intranet or internet backbone. We have implemented these solutions at Nashik Municipal Corporation (NMC) to automate their day-to-day functioning.
Nashik Municipal Corporation
Nashik Municipal Corporation (NMC) is authority looking after the Nashik Metropolitan area. It has eleven departments through which the civic operations are carried out. Municipal Commissioner heads the corporation. At present NMC does not have any full -fledged software application which will help the authorities at NMC to take decisions on important matters related to civic operations (TATA Infotech Ltd., 2001).
The Town Planning Department looks after the planning activities of the Municipal Corporation. It looks after the sanctioning of plots for construction, identifying encroachments based on complaints, sanctioning of the TDR, preparing the survey maps, DP maps. The department takes decisions on allocating lands for some specific use. It also manages the reserved lands, buildings under reservations. The Town Planning department needs to have access to the information regarding the development plan details, layout details, road details, areas under reservations so that the decision-making is simplified and the data is available to all the officials in the six ward offices.
The Roads and Building Dept looks after the maintenance of Roads and Buildings of Nashik City. The maintenance of roads includes tarring of DP roads, layout roads. The maintenance involves concretisation, tarring, widening etc. Currently there are 1049 Km of roads are in Nashik. The department looks after NMC properties on lease in terms of revenue and maintenance. There are 125 school buildings, 13000 toilets, 200 samaj mandirs and 100 health clubs under the building department. The department prepares incident report on daily, weekly, half-yearly and yearly basis.
Fig. 6: Data Entry Screen for Entering Attribute Data for each Road
The Estate and Land Acquisition Department looks after the acquisition of the land under reservations or lands, which are identified for specific purpose. Whenever a land has been identified for acquisition, first the owner of the land is notified. After that the process is initiated for taking over the land. If the owner does not agree to the settlement and refers the matter to court, then the department follows the set procedures. During this procedure, the file related to the matter is sent or received from either collectorate or the department. The details are put on to this file and referred as and when required. When the settlement is done, the details like date of settlement, amount etc is noted and the file is closed. The acquired land is then looked after by Estate dept. It maintains information about the property. The department maintains the registers for immovable property and lands.
Encroachment & Taxation Department have currently 6 divisions through which the department functions. The respective divisions look after their areas to monitor the encroachment. The department also looks after the removal of unauthorised properties, encroachment on the roads, open spaces, reserved plots etc. The Encroachment dept takes inputs from the Town Planning department about the properties on which encroachment has been done. Also encroachment on roads is also controlled. Daily or monthly tax is collected from the hawkers in the market area. The respective division collects this and the consolidated figure of the total tax collected is then sent to the head office every month. Also these divisions collect different taxes identified as Misc. Taxes. The consolidated amounts of which are reported to the head office at the end of every month. The department keeps a record of the actions taken on illega l properties on daily basis.
The Health & Sanitatin Department looks after the Sanitation of the Nasik city. The Garden Department looks after maintaining of the Gardens in the Nasik city. The Fire Department looks after the prevention of fire and other hazards and takes necessary action during emergency.
The Water Supply department provides water through pipelines to various amenities of the city. It maintains water supply and related infrastructure. The Sewerage Operations department looks after sewerage disposal and maintenance activities besides identifying treatment sites. The Electricity department supplies and maintains electric poles/ bulbs/ supply source/ cabling all over the corporation limit.
Fig. 7: Water Supply Maintenance Report for a Particular Period
Objectives
The NMC planned to develop an integrated web-GIS based system for which Tata Infotech was appointed. Currently the entire routine operations of 11 departments are done manually. However, some of the departments have stand-alone computers for their activities. The information retrieval is done through different registers and record books. The communication is through post and fax. The communication takes place through number of forms that are signed by the concerned official. The concerned persons prepare the report from the data in the register as required by the higher officials. The levels of computerisation are insignificant in these departments. The different reports, registers are generated manually. Functions in different departments are carried out manually. The current volume of manual processing at the different departments makes tracking and follow up difficult. Also the data is recorded at multiple places. Routine and periodic reports are to be compiled with accuracy and speed. Manual procedures are tedious, less productive and time consuming which directly leads to subjective decision-making. The objective of this study was to understand the working and state the requirements of the 11 departments of NMC. The objective of developing the web-GIS based application system is to improve the functioning of these departments by automation, enabling the prompt decision-making by analysis, easy information retrieval and timely, accurate, complete and updated information on corporation. The above system, which is proposed, will have a centralized database residing on the dedicated server for GIS containing all the data of the NMC accessible to all the users of the departments using maps and reports instantly. This will increase their productivity and result in the prompt decision-making.
Overview of Solution
Urban planning and information system was implemented over intranet backbone (Fig. 4) and using Windows NT server. The GIS based system has 3 modules consistently for all 11 departments. They are, Data Entry, Report Generation and GIS based query system. All the three modules can be accessed from remote machines using a browser. The only perquisites being that the terminal nodes are connected to the server via Internet or Intranet. Data Entry screens are used for entering data related to the various entities in the system. For example, data related to Town Planning department module can be entered using the TDR Properties Entry screen. The entered data is stored in an Oracle 8i RDBMS module. This data is used subsequently to link with the plot maps so as to link with the property location and related information. The screen shots in Figures 6, 7, 8 illustrate the outputs from the system. For all 11 departments under corporation namely Water Supply, Sewerage Operations, Electricity, Town Planning, Roads and Building Construction, Health and Sanitation, Estate and Land Acquisition, Administration/ Encroachment & Misc. Taxation, Fire, Garden and Accounts, the paper and survey maps were digitised and the related attributes were entered into database. Attribute data were stored in the RDBMS (Oracle 8i) and spatial data in MapInfo. The system provides the users of the NMC, tools to query, update & analyze individual department information for taking prompt decisions. The users have options to view the maps on screen and retrieve information required for decision-making. The system generates consolidated reports periodically as required by the user.
The main screen of the system is linked to all the departments (Fig. 5) and to the user administration module. The user enters into different modules using secured login information given by the system administrator. The main part of the screen shows the NMC map along with map navigation utilities like Zoom In, Zoom Out, Pan and Layer control map navigation helps to navigate through the map in an easy way. By using Zoom in and Zoom out option the user will be able to see the map in different scales and will be able to browse to the detail macro to micro level features. The pan option is to move the map on the map screen. Under the Querying option, all the required queries will be listed which will be understandable to the user. The option for Reports enables the user to generate reports related to their individual department. The Data Entry option allows the user to navigate to the concerned screens for the data entry. All the data entry screens have facilities like add-, delete-, modify-, query record, record navigation (next-, previous-, last-, first record). In the layer customisation option the user is given the option to change the properties of map layers like scale, visibility, labeing etc for better viewing.
Fig. 8: Web-GIS based Thematic Display of Electricity Supply & Respective Poles
Conclusions
Map making and geographic analysis are not new, but a GIS performs these tasks faster and with more sophistication than traditional manual methods do. Without owning the individual software, the Internet GIS technology has opened new paths for disseminating, sharing, displaying, and processing spatial information on the Internet. Web-based solutions provide a low-cost, efficient way to deliver map products to users. The urban planning and information system is a step towards web-GIS based solution, which is certainly helping public in a big way. The utility departments of NMC are encouraged to view maps and data using a PC sitting comfortably in their ward offices thereby not visiting head offices as often they did earlier. Fire and Health department departments find it useful during emergency services since all information is brought around the hot spots with the click of a button. The most beneficial amongst all departments are the roads and building and town planning. The search for maps and documents seems to be over. Where hours are counted to locate maps, now that uncertainty is over. Overall the department officers find the system too much beneficial. The future of this system lies on sharing the information to the public and to other municipal corporations of India and world via www.
References
Internet has become a competent technology for data communication due to distributing technology of the web servers. The data and maps reach to the thin clients with the minimum system requirements at user end and with the click of a button. Such technology has not only popularised the whole world but has moved scientific body to one step up. Geographers and planners, who use map and related information traditionally to plan and manage, have found Internet technology of much use since it reduces the cost of data management and information distribution to mass usages. With the advent of GIS and Internet technologies, the conventional intricacies to get solutions in time and position have been improved (Tripathy, 2000). Users can combine data and information accessed over the Intranet or Internet with the local data for display, query and analysis. In this paper, a typical example of use of GIS and Internet technology for Municipal Corporation of India has been illustrated with a typical case study where the urban planning and information system is implemented for use. There are two indigenously developed Web-GIS solutions namely PUPIS and DPIS, have been used for automating the day-to-day operations of Nashik Municipal Corporation (NMC). The functioning of all the 11 departments of this corporation has been integrated into a single system using above two solutions.
As of now in India, very few GIS organisations are proud to have implemented such system for Municipal solutions that addresses holistic approaches to solve bunch of Municipal issues based on a client - server architecture. All the three basic modules under this system, Data Entry, Reporting, GIS - based Query, can be accessed from the remote client machines located in corporations’ ward offices using a browser. The only perquisites being that the terminal nodes (Ward Offices) are connected to the server (Head Office) via Internet or Intranet. Data Entry screens are used for entering data related to the various entities related to functional requirements of all the departments. Reports (maintenance) are generated periodically for each department using the report generation facility provided within the system. These reports provide department-wise consolidated information regarding a particular entity for a given period. GIS based query is the most important module of this system since the visualisation of data and maps are the main criteria for planning and decision-making. All in all the system helps to maintain, manage, plan and analyse geographically referenced data on public utilities (water supply, sewerage, electricity) and development planning (town planning, roads and building, estate and land acquisition, accounts, fire, health and sanitation, property taxation, encroachment, garden).
Web-GIS Based Urban Planning and Information System
Introduction
Since the inception of Internet technology, a substantial growth has been registered world wide in the use of this technology. More benefits are likely to come due to improved cost in distributed computing in various application domains that reaches to mass usages. GIS products can be easily distributed to every desktop in an organisation (through the Web server) and to the general public through World Wide Web communications. Due to increased productivity, improved customer satisfaction and reduced cost, Internet GIS (Web-GIS) is gaining more popularity in the GIS users’ choice. User has a choice for any-time any-where access to the geography related information. Distributed computing is a generic term that includes other terms like Internet, Intranet, Extranet, the Web, net-work-centric, and more. The popularity in the use of web-GIS will be multi-folded if the GIS software is mature enough to take into account the points such as, data interoperability between various spatial data formats (Shp, Tab, Dwg, Dgn, Sdf), data warehouse like Oracle8i, easy access and ease of use, network architecture, flexibility to customisation and close integration with standard Web development tools (ESRI, 2000). As hardware manufacturers and technologies change over time and some manufacturers provide better functionality, performance, or communication capabilities as time evolves, the end user should look for the GIS software that supports multiple platforms. It should continue to support a wide variety of hardware platforms and to take full advantage of improvements in hardware, communications, networking, and database functionality, as they become available. Urban Planning and Information System is a web-GIS based application system for the town planners, bureaucrats, corporators and commissioners that is used to automate the day-to-day functioning of all departments and ward offices of Municipal Corporation. Sitting on his desktop and through the browser any authorised user of corporation will be able to get a visual display of all day-to-day queries, maps and maintenance reports.
Fig.1: Multi-tier Architecture of Web-GIS based Urban Planning and Information System
System Architecture
While designing any web-GIS system or solution with the help of client’s requirement, the salient factors those are important to be included are:- functional module, graphic user interface, downloading time, system performance and the cost of the solution. The system must be portable and expandable to accommodate the future changes in hardware, software and networking (Jere, 2000). Keeping in view these factors, the designing of the system has been done using MapInfo suite of products. MapXtreme, a web-GIS product from MapInfo, provides a common platform for the exchange of Web-enabled GIS data and services. MapXtreme has a framework for distributing GIS capabilities over the Internet or Intranet (Hogan, 1999). It uses server-side technologies for data integration with RDBMS and is capable of serving to multiple clients’ request in a minimum response time. It is specifically built to serve GIS on the Internet and Intranet. Typically, the client requests information from an Internet or Intranet server. Then the server processes the request and sends the information back to the client viewer. The MapXtreme server technology has multitier architecture i.e., clients, web server, application server and data server (MapXtreme, 2000).
Urban Planning and Information System is a Web-GIS based application system that amalgamates MapInfo’s MapXtreme server, Oracle8i database server and Microsoft Internet technologies like Active Server Pages (ASP) and Component Object Model (COM). This system shows the spatial and attribute data of map layers. The map features are stored in the MapXtreme server as layers or geosets. These layers are used with the database attributes for visual display of information that is required for urban planning and information system. The system requires Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS 4.0) Web server to host the system and available to the users via web browser (Fig.1). The core constituents of this design are as follows.
ASP Files: These are the Active Server Page files, which contain the presentation logic. VBScript was used for server-side scripting because it is simple, easily maintainable and integrates well with the other Microsoft technologies. Client-side scripting was done using JavaScript because it is a browser-independent scripting language & hence is best suited for client-side scripting.
COM Component: The COM is a DLL written in VB programming language that contains routines to insert, retrieve, delete and modify data into Oraccle8i database. The ASP files use these routines to insert, retrieve, delete and modify the database. The DLL handles multiple transactions to optimize data retrieval.
HTML & CSS File: The HTML file was the basic skeleton of the entire web site. This language was used as this is a static language and it has all the components for the presentation of the Web site. The CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are files those were used to improve and optimize the presentation logic and coding. The various attributes of any object in the HTML is grouped and defined in the style sheet.
GIF File: The GIF files contain the raster images of the maps after converting from vectors. Since GIF files are lighter they are the part of presentation to display the map features. The maps are actually in a vector format (tab files) and are converted to the GIF format by the interfacing layer of MapX (mapping OCX).
The web-GIS based urban planning and information system consists of 2 subsystems PUPIS and DPIS. These subsystems have very much similar architecture and process flow. However, their functionalities are different. PUPIS is useful for utility functionalities like water supply, sewerage operation and electricity networks whereas DPIS is useful for town planning and related departmental activities. Both the subsystems, however, look like a single system from user perspective. The process flow of PUPIS and DPIS are described in Fig.2 and Fig. 3 respectively.
PUPIS (Public Utility Planning and Information System)
DPIS (Development Planning and Information System)
System Configuration
Urban Planning and Information system requires the following minimum configurations.
Hardware and Software Requirements
- NT Server, 512 MB RAM, 40 GB HDD
- Pentium II workstation (Client Side Browser)
- IIS Web Server
- Database Server
- Application Server
- Mapping Server
- Network (Intranet/ Internet)
- HTTP Web Server - Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) 4.0
- Application Server - Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS) 2.0
- ADO/OLEDB - Microsoft Data Access Component (MDAC) 2.0 SP1
- Map Database – MapInfo 5.0 or above
- Mapping Server – MapXtreme (NT) 2.0 or above
- Database Server – Oracle8i
- Web Browser - Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0+
Through this system, users will be able to query and locate plots, roads, subdivisions, layout, encroached land, mosquito breeding place, water and sewerage pipelines, electric poles and other geographic features of interest, as well as view information about them, and create maps on-screen or to print. You can turn map layers “on” or “off,” depending upon your needs. Also, some of these layers are scale-dependent and can only be viewed when you are zoomed in far enough. The functional and technical benefits are as follows.
Functional
- Improve management of resources
- Interdepartmental information sharing and communication
- Better planning of public utilities services and Town Planning
- View and presentation of information (visualization of municipal assets geographically)
- Geographic database (GDB) creation and maintenance (digital, continuous and scale free cartographic GIS database)
- Perform spatial queries, spatial modeling and analysis like where are all suitable sites to build new schools, buildings, shopping malls etc.
- Tools to query, analyze, and map data in support of the decision making process
- Planning & Management of Utility and Town Planning Database
- Ease in Maintenance and better monitoring of municipal resources
- On-line Decision-Making
- Knowing where-is-what Information (Click before you dig)
- Use of color- coded thematic maps for better understanding
- Generation of maintenance and query based analytical reports
- Multi-user capability with best GUI
- Centralised database to avoid duplication, misuse and data error.
- Inserting, updating, retrieving and deleting maps and attributes
- Highly Scalable
- Highly secure with privileges to authentic users
- Basic windows operations - zooming in, zooming out, panning
- Facility to set map layers
- Facility to click on map and get layer information
- Displaying legends
- Identifying attributes attached to geographic features
- Use the clear selection tool
- Zoom to layer’s extent
- Select a layer
Fig. 5: Urban Planning and Information System
System Implementation
The Study Area
Burgeoning Information Technology sector has forced Municipal Corporations throughout the world to improve their day-to-day functions and services. Best usages are often in the areas of town planning, utility management, socio-economic planning, infokiosk and property taxation. Mostly their planning and functioning are common and similar. Therefore, the potential of introducing Internet and Intranet based IT solutions are huge and repetitive in nature. Sensing this is a prospect, TATA Infotech studied systematically and scientifically operations of few municipal corporations in India. Through such studies TATA Infotech has developed packaged solutions with the state-of-art technologies GIS, Web and RDBMS to utility planning (PUPIS) and town planning (DPIS). These packaged solutions can be implemented in client-server architecture using intranet or internet backbone. We have implemented these solutions at Nashik Municipal Corporation (NMC) to automate their day-to-day functioning.
Nashik Municipal Corporation
Nashik Municipal Corporation (NMC) is authority looking after the Nashik Metropolitan area. It has eleven departments through which the civic operations are carried out. Municipal Commissioner heads the corporation. At present NMC does not have any full -fledged software application which will help the authorities at NMC to take decisions on important matters related to civic operations (TATA Infotech Ltd., 2001).
The Town Planning Department looks after the planning activities of the Municipal Corporation. It looks after the sanctioning of plots for construction, identifying encroachments based on complaints, sanctioning of the TDR, preparing the survey maps, DP maps. The department takes decisions on allocating lands for some specific use. It also manages the reserved lands, buildings under reservations. The Town Planning department needs to have access to the information regarding the development plan details, layout details, road details, areas under reservations so that the decision-making is simplified and the data is available to all the officials in the six ward offices.
The Roads and Building Dept looks after the maintenance of Roads and Buildings of Nashik City. The maintenance of roads includes tarring of DP roads, layout roads. The maintenance involves concretisation, tarring, widening etc. Currently there are 1049 Km of roads are in Nashik. The department looks after NMC properties on lease in terms of revenue and maintenance. There are 125 school buildings, 13000 toilets, 200 samaj mandirs and 100 health clubs under the building department. The department prepares incident report on daily, weekly, half-yearly and yearly basis.
Fig. 6: Data Entry Screen for Entering Attribute Data for each Road
The Estate and Land Acquisition Department looks after the acquisition of the land under reservations or lands, which are identified for specific purpose. Whenever a land has been identified for acquisition, first the owner of the land is notified. After that the process is initiated for taking over the land. If the owner does not agree to the settlement and refers the matter to court, then the department follows the set procedures. During this procedure, the file related to the matter is sent or received from either collectorate or the department. The details are put on to this file and referred as and when required. When the settlement is done, the details like date of settlement, amount etc is noted and the file is closed. The acquired land is then looked after by Estate dept. It maintains information about the property. The department maintains the registers for immovable property and lands.
Encroachment & Taxation Department have currently 6 divisions through which the department functions. The respective divisions look after their areas to monitor the encroachment. The department also looks after the removal of unauthorised properties, encroachment on the roads, open spaces, reserved plots etc. The Encroachment dept takes inputs from the Town Planning department about the properties on which encroachment has been done. Also encroachment on roads is also controlled. Daily or monthly tax is collected from the hawkers in the market area. The respective division collects this and the consolidated figure of the total tax collected is then sent to the head office every month. Also these divisions collect different taxes identified as Misc. Taxes. The consolidated amounts of which are reported to the head office at the end of every month. The department keeps a record of the actions taken on illega l properties on daily basis.
The Health & Sanitatin Department looks after the Sanitation of the Nasik city. The Garden Department looks after maintaining of the Gardens in the Nasik city. The Fire Department looks after the prevention of fire and other hazards and takes necessary action during emergency.
The Water Supply department provides water through pipelines to various amenities of the city. It maintains water supply and related infrastructure. The Sewerage Operations department looks after sewerage disposal and maintenance activities besides identifying treatment sites. The Electricity department supplies and maintains electric poles/ bulbs/ supply source/ cabling all over the corporation limit.
Fig. 7: Water Supply Maintenance Report for a Particular Period
Objectives
The NMC planned to develop an integrated web-GIS based system for which Tata Infotech was appointed. Currently the entire routine operations of 11 departments are done manually. However, some of the departments have stand-alone computers for their activities. The information retrieval is done through different registers and record books. The communication is through post and fax. The communication takes place through number of forms that are signed by the concerned official. The concerned persons prepare the report from the data in the register as required by the higher officials. The levels of computerisation are insignificant in these departments. The different reports, registers are generated manually. Functions in different departments are carried out manually. The current volume of manual processing at the different departments makes tracking and follow up difficult. Also the data is recorded at multiple places. Routine and periodic reports are to be compiled with accuracy and speed. Manual procedures are tedious, less productive and time consuming which directly leads to subjective decision-making. The objective of this study was to understand the working and state the requirements of the 11 departments of NMC. The objective of developing the web-GIS based application system is to improve the functioning of these departments by automation, enabling the prompt decision-making by analysis, easy information retrieval and timely, accurate, complete and updated information on corporation. The above system, which is proposed, will have a centralized database residing on the dedicated server for GIS containing all the data of the NMC accessible to all the users of the departments using maps and reports instantly. This will increase their productivity and result in the prompt decision-making.
Overview of Solution
Urban planning and information system was implemented over intranet backbone (Fig. 4) and using Windows NT server. The GIS based system has 3 modules consistently for all 11 departments. They are, Data Entry, Report Generation and GIS based query system. All the three modules can be accessed from remote machines using a browser. The only perquisites being that the terminal nodes are connected to the server via Internet or Intranet. Data Entry screens are used for entering data related to the various entities in the system. For example, data related to Town Planning department module can be entered using the TDR Properties Entry screen. The entered data is stored in an Oracle 8i RDBMS module. This data is used subsequently to link with the plot maps so as to link with the property location and related information. The screen shots in Figures 6, 7, 8 illustrate the outputs from the system. For all 11 departments under corporation namely Water Supply, Sewerage Operations, Electricity, Town Planning, Roads and Building Construction, Health and Sanitation, Estate and Land Acquisition, Administration/ Encroachment & Misc. Taxation, Fire, Garden and Accounts, the paper and survey maps were digitised and the related attributes were entered into database. Attribute data were stored in the RDBMS (Oracle 8i) and spatial data in MapInfo. The system provides the users of the NMC, tools to query, update & analyze individual department information for taking prompt decisions. The users have options to view the maps on screen and retrieve information required for decision-making. The system generates consolidated reports periodically as required by the user.
The main screen of the system is linked to all the departments (Fig. 5) and to the user administration module. The user enters into different modules using secured login information given by the system administrator. The main part of the screen shows the NMC map along with map navigation utilities like Zoom In, Zoom Out, Pan and Layer control map navigation helps to navigate through the map in an easy way. By using Zoom in and Zoom out option the user will be able to see the map in different scales and will be able to browse to the detail macro to micro level features. The pan option is to move the map on the map screen. Under the Querying option, all the required queries will be listed which will be understandable to the user. The option for Reports enables the user to generate reports related to their individual department. The Data Entry option allows the user to navigate to the concerned screens for the data entry. All the data entry screens have facilities like add-, delete-, modify-, query record, record navigation (next-, previous-, last-, first record). In the layer customisation option the user is given the option to change the properties of map layers like scale, visibility, labeing etc for better viewing.
Fig. 8: Web-GIS based Thematic Display of Electricity Supply & Respective Poles
Conclusions
Map making and geographic analysis are not new, but a GIS performs these tasks faster and with more sophistication than traditional manual methods do. Without owning the individual software, the Internet GIS technology has opened new paths for disseminating, sharing, displaying, and processing spatial information on the Internet. Web-based solutions provide a low-cost, efficient way to deliver map products to users. The urban planning and information system is a step towards web-GIS based solution, which is certainly helping public in a big way. The utility departments of NMC are encouraged to view maps and data using a PC sitting comfortably in their ward offices thereby not visiting head offices as often they did earlier. Fire and Health department departments find it useful during emergency services since all information is brought around the hot spots with the click of a button. The most beneficial amongst all departments are the roads and building and town planning. The search for maps and documents seems to be over. Where hours are counted to locate maps, now that uncertainty is over. Overall the department officers find the system too much beneficial. The future of this system lies on sharing the information to the public and to other municipal corporations of India and world via www.
References
- ESRI, 2000, Home Page of ESRI for ArcIMS at htpp://www.esri.com.
- Hogan, C. L., 1999, Mapping on the Web Using MapInfo Products, pp.1. http://www.gisdevelopment.net/technology/intgis/techig0007.htm.
- Jere, Ajit, 2000, The Future of Internet GIS - An Opportunity all the way, pp.1-2. http://www.gisdevelopment.net/technology/intgis/techig0006.htm.
- MapXtreme, 2000, Home Page site at http://www.MapXteme.com.
- TATA Infotech Ltd., 2001, SRS for Creation of GDB and Development of GIS based Application, pp.8-14.
- Tripathy, G.K. and Jothimani, P. (2000) : Vehicle Tracibility System Using GIS-GPS, presented at Geomatics 2000 conference organised by C-DAC, Pune University, Pune between Jan 21-22.