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G. K. Tripathy, S. Sen, S. Shukla and P. Jothimani Applied Technology Group, Tata Infotech Ltd SEEPZ, Andheri (E), Mumbai 400 096 gk.tripathy@tatainfotech.com Commercial applications using GIS techniques is not much realised in
India. With the use of Internet as a medium for disseminating information to
larger population, the role of GIS in terms of commercial applications has been
multi-folded. Both GIS and Internet technologies are definitely in the forefront
of present IT developments in application sectors like telecommunication,
e-commerce, navigation, videoconferencing and power systems. Recent developments
in public health and security systems to improvise their targeting and response
time are based on GIS, GPS and Internet technologies.
Objective “Location ID” system is an amalgamation of CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) and MapInfo GIS to deliver the locational information of a telephone caller. This is based on acquiring the caller’s identity number through CTI and using digital data of city and its telephone users’ addresses. As a call is registered through CTI, the display module based on GIS is used to locate the address (location) of the caller over the digital map. The system also generates a delivery path, allocation of nearest place of attendance and work order to follow up the route from the position of the caller. Designed Solution The proposed solution of Location ID system consists of few modules and takes into care a few aspects of the conditions that are involved in the development and integration of the modules. These are as follows:
CTI Interface CTI refers to the coordination of telephone calls with data processing functions. For example, when a call comes, it can be identified through its ANI (Calling number, obtained via ISDN or analog lines enable for caller identification). This identifier can trigger a database lookup to determine which department the call should be connected to and who is the likely caller. The application may even consult the clock, forwarding calls to different agents or to a completely automated IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system depending on the time of the day. In the Location ID- CTI, the event of an incoming call and the capture of the CALLER ID (Caller Identification) are trapped. This programme runs as a continuous process monitoring the CTC server. In the event of a call, the CALLER ID is written into a text file in the root directory and the display module of the Location ID is executed. Display Module The Display Module runs in a MapInfo GIS environment. It utilises the map data of the city (say Mumbai), namely the building/monument, road and region data and also uses the Location ID table and the Routes table created by the Geocoding Tool and the Path Finding tool respectively. On execution, the Display of all the maps in a single window is done. After reading the last entry of telephone number in the text file (trt.txt) done by the CTI programme, the Display module then blinks at the point represented by the location (x,y) in the Location ID table. The map is also centred to that point. This action could be repeated by making clicking on the first button (Refresh) in the Location ID menu. On clicking the second button the shortest route to that point from a pre-defined point-based on the routes table is displayed.  Figure On clicking the last button the list of roads to be traversed is displayed along with their identification numbers and the length. Geocoding Tool This tool reads input data from the telephone users’ addresses (directory data) and writes into the Location ID table its latitude and longitude entries as x and y respectively. The values are read after matching the address fields to the map objects in the corrected digital map data. The matching is done based on region, street and building/(point features) matching sequentially. The string search is based on current name, old name and plot number in case of buildings while for streets it is old/new street names and pin code/locality name respectively. Path Finding Tool This programme reads the Location ID table and finds out the shortest path to that entry from a pre-defined point. The programme finds these routes using the Dijkstra’s single source shortest path algorithm from a single vertex. These routes are stored in the Routes table with telephone numbers as their ID. The tool requires road data in tabular files (*.tab) and these road data need to be clean (devoid of dangles, multi-polyline object-free, circular path-free etc). Technical Requirements The basic hardware/software, required to run the system, are as follows: Hardware & Software
For installation of the programme the following data files/tables, as shown below, are copied into the directory (C:\LOCID). “Wards.tab”, “Railways.tab”, “Roads.tab”, “Landmarks.tab”, “Location ID.tab”, “test.tab”, “routes.tab”, “landuse.tab”, “trt.txt”, “MTNLdata.tab” and “Test 0.2.MBX” The tools of Geocoding and Path Finding (Geocode.mbx and Route.mbx) can be installed optionally. The CTI component needs to be installed separately.  Graphical representaion of CTI-MapInfo architecture Application Execution Make the CTI application active by running it (the CTC service on the server should be available). One has to wait till a telephone call is registered. In the event of an incoming call the blinking occurs for 5 seconds after which the place is labelled with a number. The number corresponding to it in the message window follows the details like latitude and longitude position, address and name of the caller. To repeat the blink action, press the first button on the Location ID menu. To find the shortest path, click on the second button. The shortest path to the point from the pre-fixed destination is displayed. To generate the Work Order, browser table that is the list of roads to be traversed along with length information, click on the third button. On receiving a new call, a new MapInfo GIS window is opened. To obtain the information on the same window, click on the first button of the Location ID menu in the first MapInfo window. The execution process continues in the batch mode throughout till the user desires to cancel. Conclusions In the system testing, a small sample of Mumbai city was successfully executed . There are a few disadvantages of the system because of inherent inaccuracy or error in the input data. The road names are either missing or have duplicate names. The telephone subscribers’ addresses do not have one-to-one match with that of city digital records. The level of accuracy in digital data cannot be in the individual subscriber’s level. Sometimes the road data, having both-ends not connected or even circular, need to be cleaned before using the routing solution. We are, therefore, updating our “Location ID” system to take into account these errors.
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