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Abstract
The primary function of information in urban planning and management is to provide factual status and secondly to support analysis and decision making on environment. An assessment of the user need of urban planning reveals that planner's success or strength lies in interpreting and assessing the interrelation between various functional elements on a temporal and spatial format of urban form. Planning and implementation of Tindivanam Town draws various sources of geographic and attribute data. Geographic data for this town are in different scale, such as Master Plan from village maps (scale 1: 7920), Detailed Development Plan from Field Measurement Book (FMB) (scale 1:1584), line map from aerial photo (scale 1: 2500) and various facility location in the village map. Temporally these maps are varying dates and non-geo-referenced. A task was set to built GIS data base for Tindivanam with data integration for query out-put as its focus. It was found from the case that GIS has the capacity to efficiently integrating spatial data base for urban planning. However, it was also noted that the spatial errors from the original paper maps do severely cause limitations of information integration for urban planning. The efficiency of GIS in urban planning could be achieved only if reliable(perhaps with GPS), latest spatial data with moderate scale is constituted on rational basis.

Introduction:
Increase in population size and industrialization of urban areas in India draw the focus of urban planning problems as national agenda. Added to this is the increasing number of villages grown-up at faster rate as urban centers. Planning and management of urban centers, therefore, needs quicker reactions to the ground truth as well decisions made dynamically matching to the ground truth and not on static information base. One of the prime requirement of such a planning process is the information supply to meet the challenging task to identify planning problems, preparation of plans and implementation. All these three stages are of either long term strategic nature or short term action plan. Traditional information back-up of planning department are paper based, wide gap between the ground and paper, time and cost consuming efforts to update the information (Sekar, 1997). Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is a vehicle through which planners can be backed with geographical and attribute data for analysis and decision making process with fast update and analysis. Building-up of GIS database fir Tindivanam Town of Tamil Nadu is a pioneering such case taken-up by the Commissionerate of Town and Country Planning, Government of Tamil Nadu.

Tindivanam Town:

User Department's Need Assessment:
The main objective of the project was to integrate different scaled information to common base as to allow calling and comparing spatial and attribute information across themes. The details of the themes and its attributes ate shown in the table 3.1.


Table 3.1. Themes and attribute data base for Tindivanam Town - 2000

Sl.No.	Name of the Theme	Scale of the Map	Major attribute	Source data
1	Master Plan (Existing and Proposed Land use)	1: 7920	Land-use, survey number	Village maps complied to form LPA
2	Detailed Development Plan (DDP)	1: 1584	Land-use at micro level	FMB records complied to form DDP area
3	Cadastral maps	1: 3960	Survey number	Village and FMB maps
4	Line map from aerial photo (1996)	1.:2500	Entity ids	From aerial photos
5	Social facilities	1:7920	User ids	Village maps and attribute data
6	Water supply	1:7920	User ids	On village map with ids

While the project was in development stage, discussions were held to assess the user's requirement. There are three basic user requirements were listed. One, to have digital data base of all the themes in a common scale; secondly, to analyses urban development process using cross theme data base. Eg. Building location and area called from line map overlaid on cadastral map of Detailed Development Plan and compute Floor Space Index (FSI) of that property; compare buildings from line map and land-use from DDP to validate the trend of development etc. Thirdly, to use the GIS data base for update and add further attribute data on each the theme from various agencies. The third task is an important activity of the Town Planning Department as they have the responsibility to prepare the development plan of the town. As of now, this department is handicapped with non-availability of geographical data such as power line, trees, buildings, slope etc. While preparing the development plan (Master Plan, DDP, Town Planning Schemes etc.) the Town Planning department invest time, cost and material for the survey of the town area keeping the revenue map at the background all the features need to be surveyed from the field.

It was anticipated that the integrated GIS data base would serve the purpose of all the three stages explained above. By which, the GIS data base would aid the Town Planning department in:

1. Preparing new or revise Master Plan
2. Preparing new or revise DDP
3. Analyzing the land-use pattern
4. Adding geographic and attribute data from other department Using it for planning permission
5. In analyzing land value and Tax assessment

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