Page 1 of 3 Next  Walid Khalf Sayeed Barakat Dept of Information Technology, Medina Municipality, Al Medina Al Munawara Barakat@amana-md.gov.sa  Mohammed Abdul Mannan Dept of Information Technology Medina Municipality, Al Medina Al abdulmannan@amanamd.gov.sa Introduction Acity is usually the centre of education, trade, industry, cultural life, government, etc. It offers a variety of opportunities, which always has attracted people. The increase in population or public needs inevitably leads to increase in both complexity of tasks that have to be planned and the information that has to be processed. One of such complex task is digging the ground safely, without any disruptions to utility services. This application is primarily developed, according to the needs of city Madinah. Al Madinah Al Munawarah also known as "City of Light" is second holiest city in the history of Islam attracting in numerous people as tourists & pilgrimage from the world throughout the year. Due to increase in demand the city is continuously expanding results in designing of new utility elements. The study area in planning affairs requires Georeferenced information while digging any site. In order to look after the safety of utility elements already passing under the digging site and to ensure the future planning of network. It is necessary to communicate with all utility departments before digging the site. In the earlier days, any digging site had to be mapped on paper and get approval from each utility department. This procedure was not only time consuming but also insecure. It has lot of disadvantages as compared to current online digging system. Developments in both communications and computer have opened up new horizons to deal with such complex issues. Visualizations on web electronic market is considered as a new information revolution and tremendous amount of money and manpower have been invested in web based commerce systems. Integration of such technologies with GIS has resulted in the development new applications, the current developed system called Digging Information System can be held as an example. The application has two major divisions based on access to application i.e. access by Internet and access by Intranet. There are about six utility departments (can be called external departments) that access this application through Internet. The Internet system works on Client/Server concept that involves splitting the application into tasks between server and client. This application has three components a Client, a Server and a Network (Hall 1994). This application holds a column for seventh department called as Amana. Amana department is the representative of other six departments (say internal departments), which works on Intranet. The above system starts with login page and to authenticate users and their roles. Basically there are two types of roles played in action. One is contractor who initiates the new dig- order for a utility purpose and the other is Department which approves or rejects the order. Initially every new dig-order will be in dormant stage, wherein all departments cannot see the order in the list of their pending orders except the representative department or owner department. Dormant orders are made active by the representative utility department after checking some validity conditions like contractor doesn't hold any old penalties, digging path is rightly coordinated on ground, etc. Dormant orders are made active with a function called 'ShowToAll' available on application, Once the order is made active, it will be populated to all screens. All departments are subject to give their decision within 3 working days for this active order, which they can see in their list of pending orders. Departments entitled to give their decision can use the supportive functions on application like viewing the digging path on Map with applicable spatial layers and quickbird image as background, order attributes and its coordinates on new dynamic pages, printable format of order with its location on map and important details etc. The details of the order are hyperlinked on dynamic pages. Moreover the decision on each order by each department can also be viewed. All the external six departments give their decisions through Internet but the decision from seventh department (Amana) is result of second part of application called "Internal Application", which is accessed through Intranet, and is developed with Oracle form and MapBasic programming. Six internal departments use this part and depending upon their decisions Amana give its decision. If any of six internal departments reject the order then Amana concludes its decision as rejection on external application (accessible though Internet). The department's names and reasons for their rejection can be viewed by external departments on hyperlinked page in column list of Amana department.  Fig. 1 Regulations of each department  Fig. 2 New order form TOOLS Digging Information System has two divisions working on common Oracle database, they are external and internal. The External part (Internet application) can be divided into two parts they are Mapping and Transaction part. Mapping Part has been programmed using MapX components of MapXtreme 3.0. The Spatial layers are available as Tab (*.Tab) or Workspace (*.wor), which are then converted into Geoset (*.gst). Transaction part holds complete business logic written in Visual Basic 6.0 and converted into dll (as Com object). The object performs communication with database in Oracle for data manipulation like creating, editing, adding, deleting records etc.
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