A Customized GIS application for Dehradun Tourist Information System

Transcription

1 A Customized GIS application for Dehradun Tourist Information System K. Ram Mohan Rao, Ismat Bakshihov and B.S. Sokhi Abstract The diversity in GIS usage makes it difficult to create one piece of software to cater to everyone s needs. Customization is the process of adapting a generic system to individual specifications so that certain tasks can be carried out even by persons not so familiar with the generic software. If customized applications are made available for specific applications with relevant menus and user interfaces, users will certainly find easy to make use of such applications for decision-making and information retrieval. The authors demonstrate that customized applications enable non technical users to utilize the GIS comfortably without much technical expertise in the GIS software. 1. INTRODUCTION New technologies and scientific developments are changing the traditional use of GIS. In fact, developments in the field of computer science has been largely influenced by the traditional GIS use in all aspects of technology ranging from hardware, database generation, data processing, computing, network technology and data handling to presentation methods. Initially, GIS started with traditional desktop GIS where the database, interface and program logic were stored in the same machine. The client / server architecture, the compatibility of computer programming environment with the GIS application software completely changed the scenario of GIS usage. The programming support is frequently used to calculate the values needed for analysis, to perform the repetitive tasks, to create customized GIS interfaces, to automate complex GIS modeling. As software is one of the main components of GIS process, the software system development was taking place in specific purpose and highly tailored for each application in the early days (Goodchild et al, 2004). Although all major GIS packages have friendly window based user interface, users generally require specialized training without which they find it difficult to use them, K.Ram Mohan Rao, obtained his Master of Computer Applications from Nagarjuna University in Presently, he is working as Scientist in Indian Institute of Remote Sensing (NRSC), Dehradun. He has research expertise in the fields of Spatial Databases, GIS Customization and dissemination including programming languages, and Distributed GIS. Ismat Bakshihov, obtained his Bachelor of engineering specialization with IT in 2003 and Post Graduate Diploma in Remote Sensing and Geographical Information Systems from Centre for Space Science and Technology Education in Asia and Pacific, India in Presently, he is working with National Aerospace Agency, Research Institute of Aerospace Informatics, Azerbaijan. B.S. Sokhi did his Master s degree in Urban and Regional Planning from School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi in 1982, and also M.Sc. in Human Settlement Analysis, from ITC, The Netherlands in He joined the Indian Institute of Remote Sensing, Department of Space, Government of India, Dehradun in Presently he is holding the post of Head, Human Settlement Analysis Division. sokhi@iirs.gov.in 86

2 particularly for query processing and information extraction. If customized applications are made available for specific applications with relevant menus and user interfaces, users will certainly find easy to make use of such applications for decision-making and information retrieval. Customized applications enable non-technical users to utilize the GIS comfortably without much technical expertise in the GIS software. The GIS customization process is also used to simplify the application Graphical User Interface (GUI) interface by removing many of the unneeded pull down menus, buttons, tools, etc, to add new elements, tools required for specialized application by modifying modules, functions or scripts. This process provides the capability to build customized application with end user oriented capabilities. Customization offers many advantages for GIS users and developers. The main advantages are user gets process-specific business rules that closely match with their requirements and also customized applications are easy to operate. As far as developers are concerned, developing a combination of a generic system and a customization capability is a cost-effective solution for small to medium sized markets (Rao et al, 2006). But customization is expensive and time-consuming process, which requires a great degree of expertise and input. This problem can be really answered by software engineering approach (Pressman, 2004). There is a variety of customization tools exists in the present GIS environment. Arc Macro Language (AML) is a software platform with list of normal ARC commands; some features for variables, looping are used in ARC/INFO. AVENUE is an object oriented environment to create customized environment in ArcView. ArcGIS is used to create customized GIS applications in Microsoft Visual Basic Environment (VBE), Python using COM model, also to tie functionality from other programming languages (C++, Java). And these programmers also have the options with other customization tools like Business Map, Map Linux, etc. 2. THE STUDY AREA 2.1 Historical background of Dehradun city Dehradun, one of the most important towns of the state of Uttarakhand, located at an altitude of 700 m, serves as the gateway to many other places of tourist interest like Haridwar, Rishikesh, Badrinath, Kedarnath, Gangotri, and Yamunotri. The district situated in the Northwest corner of the state having distinct tracts i.e. the montane tract and the sub montane tract. The Montane tract covers whole Chakrata Tehsil of the district and consists entirely of a succession of mountains and gorges and comprises Jaunsar-Bhabar. Whereas below the mountain tract follows the sub Montane tract, which is the famous Doon Valley bounded by Shivalik Hills in the south and outer scarp of the Himalayas in the north. Dehradun city, headquarters of the state, is visited by a large number of tourists every year, many of them en-route to Mussoorie. The climate of the 87

3 city is temperate. Even during summer, it is not as warm at Dehradun as in the district south of it. The Forest Research Institute which is world famous for its research work in forestry and is the only institution of its kind in Asia is situated here. Besides, headquarters of the important establishments like the Oil and Natural Commission; Survey of India, etc., the Military Academy are also located here. The other places of importance are the Robber s cave, situated at a distance of about 8 kms from Dehradun. The cave is a natural picnic spot surrounded by hills where water suddenly disappears from sight and goes underground only to reappear after a few yards in the form of a stream. The city has many beautiful rest houses and good hotels to provide accommodation to the tourists. For many years, it has been one of the best known educational centers in northern India. 2.2 Technologies and data being used Map Objects 2.1 and Visual Basic Environment are used for the customization process. Other GIS software also used for building the Geospatial database using IKONOS data. The details of software technologies being used in this work are mainly ArcGIS 8.3, Erdas Imagine 8.7 for geospatial data preparation, MapObjects 2.1 and VBE for the customization of the DTIS. IKONOS data of Dehradun area (acquired on :50 GMT), Dehradun guide map, Fig. 1 Methodology of DTIS Customization 88

4 secondary data from the Mussoorie Dehradun Development Authority (MDDA) has been used for the map generation of the study area. Fig. 1 explains the detailed process of the DTIS generation and implementation. 3. DTIS MAIN CHARACTERISTICS AND FUNCTIONALITIES DTIS stands for Dehradun Tourist Information System, name that clearly summarizes the main characteristics of the tool developed. The DTIS is desktop based customized GIS application tool with rich features. The tool offers same deployment ease as a thin application with nearly the same enhanced interactivity and usability of a traditional desktop application. The interface, programming logic, and data sets are integrated with the tool for easy to use deployment and operation. Besides, it is completely developed with GUI environment with modular portable technologies of Arc and VBE to generate maps, legends, scale bar. 3.1 DTIS Functionalities DTIS provides the following functionalities to the user: Zoom-in, zoom-out: by activating the zoom in or, alternatively, the zoom out (Fig. 2) function, a panel to choose the desired level of zoom is presented to the user and the map is then zoomed according to the chosen level. Pan: The users can click on the main map to drag it to position it. Identity: To retrieve the corresponding non-spatial details of the features Addlayer, remove layer: To add/remove layer(s) from the main menu Search option: To provide spatial/non-spatial search Rendering the features: To reveal the attribute information Symbolizing the layers and features Feature selection with retrieval of the objects: GUI based query support to retrieve spatial and non-spatial information. 4. THE STRUCTURE OF THE DTIS In order to show how DTIS reaches the objectives for which it has been designed, it is necessary to look at how it is structured and how the different elements that compose it interact among them. The DTIS is mainly built with the objective to create GIS Customized Application for Dehradun Tourist Information System (DTIS) with an easy to use Graphical User Interface (GUI). In the first part, we have created the spatial data in GIS environment (boundary, roads, railways, hospitals, banks, schools, institutions). After that the second part consists of customization in a modular software engineering approach using MapObjects and VBE. 89

5 Fig. 2 DTIS Front end: Zoom in-out 4.1 Data preparation The spatial database for the current study area is generated using Remote Sensing (RS) and Geographical Information System (GIS) technique. Fused IKONOS panchromatic and multispectral data merged of the year April 2001 at a scale of 1:25,000 has been used as source data to identify the ground details in the study area (see Fig. 3). From the source data facility details (hotels, banks, hospitals, institutions, and other facilities), road, railway information, boundary layers are generated using onscreen digitization process. The attributes of the features were collected Fig. 3 Fused IKONOS 1m resolution data 90

6 during field work. Names and details about places of tourists interest were collected from Dehradun Tourist Center. Locations and photographs of tourist interest points were collected directly from tourist places during field work. Figure 4 shows the spatial and non-spatial database of the study area. 4.2 Design of Introduction Form In this form user gets the generic information about the type of application, title information, author (s), and an example view of data. The introduction Fig. 4 Spatial/Nonspatial database of the layers Fig.5 Introduction Form form will highlight the start button to take into the application. 4.3 Design of Main Form The main form is a GUI based form with menu bar(s) which include FILE, EDIT, VIEW, LAYERS and HELP. There is some more tools customized for Print, Map Properties (add layer), Find, Full map extent, Active layer extent, Zoom in, Zoom out, Pan, Identify and Spatial selection. The left site of the window is table of content window. 91

7 The right side of the main form consists of important places to visit are showcased with mouse click event. The File, Edit menus consists of options with print, find. View menu consists of Map properties, several utility tools. Layers menu consists of adding, removing, legend editor option. The main menu is provided with good help option to known about the tools with necessary information. The main menu also consists of map units view, mouse location and also the time stamp option. Fig. 6 The design of main form 4.4. Toolbar Design In this application easy to use window based tool bar is designed with advanced features. Visual Basic includes a toolbar control that can be used in conjunction with an ImageList control to display a collection of buttons at the top of a form. For printing important outputs, print option is enabled for the users. Two options are provided for the printing: Print to fill the page and Print to scale. The printed collection is a list of all the printers on the system running on the application. 4.5 Design of Map properties (add layer) In this option Add Layer option is included for adding map layer (s) to the main menu, by selecting map units and changing map background. After clicking Add Layer button, it will take to My Computer dialog window. User can select particular directory where the data files are located. Depending on the Fig. 7 Features of menu bar 92

8 unit of the added shape files, user can also change map unit to meter or to decimal degrees or to feet. By clicking color window, user can change color of background: 4.6. DESIGN OF FIND FEATURES Find option is very important and very flexible option in this project. From map display window all features are not visible. And finding any features visually is a difficult task. This problem was solved by using Find features option. In this window, the user can find any feature, such as Fig. 8 Map properties window roads, tourist places, hotels, banks, hospitals, facility, institutions, and roads, etc. Selected features are highlighted spatially and nonspatially. All attribute information about features is displayed on right site of dialog window. In this window information about features are displayed in three column format: location, information and name (see Fig. 9) DESIGN OF IDENTIFY RESULTS By using identify option, users can get information about features directly from map. By clicking on features on map, the identify dialog window will Fig. 9 Feature selection by Find object 93

9 Fig. 10 Identify results open. And all attribute information will display on identify window. The information about the interested features can be obtained by using identify option. The feature flashes, or the cell or triangle is singled out, and the Identify Results window appears, listing all its attributes from the table (figure 10) Design of spatial selection In this application, design of spatial selection is implemented through a window based design. By using this option, the user can search a feature with multiple conditions by providing the required information in the form. Figure 11 shows the spatial selection of particular hotels which are located within 500meters buffer distance from the Clock Tower area. Using Convert the selected set into a new shape file option user can save selected sets into a new shape file for further options Design of legend editor Maps become most interesting when symbols are applied to features in such a way as to reveal information about places. In this section, a legend window display the techniques for controlling the symbols used to Fig. 11 Spatial selection draw layers. Symbolizing features by ClassBreaksRenderer group the feature into different ranges of numeric values, ValueMapRenderer apply a symbol to each unique value, DotDensithRenderer draws polygon features (ESRI, 2001) with random dot patterns, whose density corresponds to the value in a numeric field from the attribute table, Labelrenderer draws text from an attribute value are implemented to do the analysis online (see Fig. 12). 94

10 Fig. 12 Symbolizing features in DTIS The generation of rich user interfaces through the use of visual basic is the second technology used that the DTIS project is used. Considering the results and feedback it produced, it is possible to say that this approach has allowed developers to create quite advanced features in geospatial environment with simple, good looking, easy to use environment, and complete visual interface with a very limited amount of code by using the object library. The structure of DTIS just described, in addition to the above mentioned advantages in term of better usability and easy to use interface has also many advantages in respect to ease in software maintenance. The tool has been developed totally in a modular environment by using object oriented approach with objects in the MapObjects library. The mechanism of installation is easy and the tool does not require the support of any GIS environment. 5. AN APPLICATION OF THE DTIS FOR FACILITY MAPPING AND TOURISM The first implementation of the DTIS deals with the data and maps of Dehradun. A visitor can find lot of facilities, touring places and corresponding feature s details by using this tool. A data model of the DTIS comprises of the following data. Tourist places; Hotels; Hospitals; Banks; Institutions; 95

11 Bus station(s); Other facilities; Roads; Railway; and Boundary. The feature data has been described by the associated attribute data that can be retrieved by means of query operations. This application has all the functionalities available in DTIS, i.e. Zoom-in-out, Pan, feature symbolization, feature query, attribute based query, layer management, legend, scale bar, and reference map. 6. CONCLUSIONS The diversity in GIS usage makes it difficult to create one piece of software to cater to everyone s needs (Peng and Tsou, 2003). If customized applications are made available for specific applications with relevant menus and user interfaces, users will certainly find easy to make use of such applications for decision-making and information retrieval. The DTIS is a feature rich customized desktop GIS application tool that makes use of customizing environment of VBE to provide versatile interface to access GIS data and maps. User friendly interactive form has been designed for each command. All forms consist of labels, text boxes, command buttons, pictures and details for guiding the end user to efficiently handle the application. User friendly tool bar has been added with full functionalities of Zoom in, Zoom out, Pan, Identity, Spatial Query, Adding Layer, Search, Print map. Rendering features are also included to reveal the information about the attributes, symbolizing the layers, symbolizing features, symbolizing features by attribute values. REFERENCES Environmental Systems Research Institute (1996) MapObjects: GIS and Mapping Components, Redlands, CA. Goodchild M.F. (1992) Geographical data modeling, Computers and Geosciences, Vol. 18, Issue 4, pp K. Ram Mohan Rao, P.M. Bala Manikavelu, T. Shankar Prasad (2006) A Software engineering approach to GIS customization, ICORG 2006 Conference on Geo-Informatics for Rural Development Achieving Synergy between Technical and Social Systems organized at Hyderabad June 5-7, Peng, Z.R., Tsou, M.H. (2003) Internet GIS: Distributed Geographic Information Services for the Internet and wireless networks, John Wiley and Sons, New Jersey. Pressman, R.S. (2004) Software Engineering: A Practitioner s Approach, McGraw-Hill Education Press, New York. 96