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Albany Information Warehouse
Saikat Bhattacharya
bhatts3@rpi.edu
Graduate Student,
M.S. (Informatics and Architecture),
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute,
Residence: 151, Apartment # 1,
10th Street,
Troy, New York-12180
ph: 518-274-7516
Abel and Rusdi
Introduction:
Rapid growth of the World Wide Web has proven its worth as medium of information transmission. With both audio and visual data dissemination capabilities, it has been accepted as an effective communication tool. Development of spatial information technologies over the past few decades (primarily the development of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and raster image processing and modeling tools) have made the handling and manipulation of spatial data relatively simple.
Until the recent past, much of GIS data was manipulated and used predominantly by select few who had access to GIS data and were trained in handling spatial databases. With the increasing use of GIS technology in various fields and with the growing importance of information distribution, the World Wide Web provides an ideal medium to make these previously advanced GIS tools accessible to a wider audience. The development of HTML and associated client–server technologies has enabled the growth in information access and distribution.
The project:
The ‘Albany information warehouse’ acts as a platform for information exchange at city level as well as at community level by the members of that community or users hunting for information. By information, we specifically mean information that has spatial context to it. Geographic Information systems are the technology that is used to manipulate, store, retrieve and access spatial data. GIS stores data of objects in geographic locations and related descriptions of it in layers.
This project is structured with focus on the information exchange between cross platforms and cross applications, namely the GIS and the hypermedia. Remote clients use the web technology to get their queries across to the remote server, which has GIS application residing as tool to extract information from the spatial database and throwing the results on to the client. Started as a purely experimental project, based on technological limitations of the various components of the entire communication process, the project has been knit together using non-conventional data exchange methods and applications. The elegantly minimalized user interface (the webpage) is aimed at organizing information to the users in a comprehensible manner. This has been done keeping in mind the broad range of users (from different age groups, backgrounds, socio-economic backgrounds, etc.) that the site would cater to. Accommodating commercial, infrastructural and housing information, the most common use of this platform would be to aid users who are new to Albany, as well as the residents of Albany community in their search for information required in daily life.
Back end technology:
The Common gateway interface is comprised of a visually elegant interface layout using HTML. The information is stacked in sections for structuring purposes. When the user at the client end posts a query on the front end, the request invokes the associated dynamic link library (DLL) files, which communicate with the web server and parse the query into components. As in dynamic content approach, this DLL helps trigger the correct VB application to make a connection to the MapInfo Server. The Visual Basic files have a sequence of related commands in a GIS compatible format for the final data extraction and delivery.
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