Geo-web application for greening India: an open source technology development

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1 Geo-web application for greening India: an open source technology development Sampath Kumar P, Hyderabad, India. Reedhi Shukla, Hyderabad, India. Abstract India is faced with the challenges of sustaining its rapid growth while dealing with the global threat of climate change. These threat originates from accumulated greenhouse gas emission in the atmosphere, anthropogenic generated through long-term and intensive industrial growth. This is hampering the ecological balance, which leads to abnormal changes in regional as well as global climate. In order to support the specific requirement of suitable land availability for greening, a support system is developed which uses multi-criteria analysis of various parameters. The wasteland in the region becomes the primary data from which the various land patches such as degraded forest, water logged areas, scrub, barren lands etc., will be identified. These lands will be analyzed in support with other such as soil, climate, land cover, topography. This analysis will enable to derive the suitable lands and they further will be prioritized based on their possibility to realize the objective in these areas based on various socio-economic and administrative imperatives. Emergence of new technologies and knowledge in open source has given boost to the web based GIS. To make use of this analysis carried by various experts and other a geo spatial web application is developed using open source tools and technology. Various factors required for indentifying suitable sites are integrated and organized in opensource GeoRDBMS (Postgres+PostGIS) and published as OGC web services for interoperability using Geoserver. The application has functionality for building multi attribute based query and save and visualize the locations in 3D environment such as Bhuvan, Google Earth etc. The application also has capability to access services from multiple servers across global network and also provided with various GIS tools for the analysis. Hence it is acclaimed by various forest officials of utilizing the Remote Sensing and GIS database integrated with Opensource technologies for identifying the suitable sites of improving greenery. Thus, this paper illustrates how open source geospatial technologies can be used in innovative ways for organizing the spatial data and developing user friendly, easy, effective and economical web based GIS application useful for decision making Keywords- greening India, open source GIS, geoweb, OGC web services and Geo-RDBMS I. INTRODUCTION The fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change[4] concluded from direct observations of Harish Karnatak Indian Institute of Remote Sensing, ISRO Dehradun, India, harish@iirs.gov.in C S Jha, Hyderabad, India. Jha_cs@nrsc.gov.in changes in temperature, sea level, and snow cover in the northern hemisphere during 1850 to the present. These climate changes could lead to impacts on freshwater availability, oceanic acidification, food production, flooding of coastal areas and increased burden of vector borne and water borne diseases associated with extreme weather events. Deforestation and burning petroleum products are main reasons behind these alarming changes. Forests are repositories of genetic diversity, and play a vital role in maintaining ecological balance. Wasteland mapping of India completed in year 2005 has brought out about 12.6 million hectare (4.44%) is under degraded forest category [6]. So in order to maintain the ecological balance afforestation is required by identifying the suitable sites are for this purpose. So, datasets of various resource themes available under ISRO / DOS programme were analyzed to identify degraded forest and prioritized by multi-criteria analysis. Based upon suitability, sites for afforestation as well as plantation of various species will be suggested for improving upon continuous dense forest. The development of internet technology, the application of GIS is being gradually upgraded from desktop application to network application. Extensive use of Internet allows the spatial resource on the network is broadened continually thus making it accessible to a wide range of users. The main purpose of Web GIS is to realize the issue of spatial geographic and data sharing on the Internet, to make user be able to access GIS data through web browser, and to execute GIS functions like query, statistics, edit, filter, swapping and many more. [2]. Development of new technologies like web2.0, AJAX, Web services has given boost to the webgis development. The emergence of Web Service technique overcomes the shortcomings of traditional Distributed Object technique and provides the interoperable capability of cross-platform and cross-language in distributed environment. The Web services architecture establishes a standard interconnection rules between services and clients that nicely support the dynamic integration of data, which is the key to creating a spatial data infrastructure. [7]. Recent development of AJAX in web2.0 is 1 P age

2 OSGEO-India: FOSS4G First National Conference "OPEN SOURCE GEOSPATIAL RESOURCES TO eye caching for the web developers as it greatly improves the performance and allows the client side processing. Development of these new technologies allows integration of GIS and web technologies with expert systems that can provide valuable real-time spatial decision support. The integration of GIS with analyticall modeling, simulation and decision-support systems can significantly increasee the functionality of GIS and results in developing the systems of various domain experts for better GIS analysis and implementation. II. DATA, TOOLS AND TECHNOLOGY USED Various datasetss prepared under numerous projects for the country are aimed to be used in this work. This primarily includes the data pertaining wasteland various time periods along with land use land cover data, soil data, elevation, meteorological, bio diversity and socio economicc data, etc. In addition administrative boundaries, infrastructure, location of various towns will also be used for the necessary analysis and mapping. The datasets and categories are given below (Fig 1). Open Layers - 2D Visualization Bhuvan - Spatial Data Web Servicee III. METHODOLOGY National mission for Green India is one of the major component under National Action Plan for Climate Change [5] has focused aims to Increase the forest cover and density and Conserve Biodiversity. Keeping these goals in focus, datasets under various categories (Fig 1) viz thematic, topographic, socio economic, meteorological are collected and organized in spatial form. Since these datasets are generated or collected at various spatial resolutions/scales, they were normalized to standard grid for the country at 1sqare kilometer is prepared and thesee datasets are assigned through geo- etc. statistical analysis such as zonal statistics, interpolation The grids are organized into Postgresql with Spatial referencee system of having EPSG These datasets are stored state wise, based on the user s requirement. Then, the state dataa is published as service using Geoserver as Web Feature Service as the data to used for spatial query and analysis. Further the development of web application is carried out using open layers API and GeoExt in PHP and Javascript. The application implementation architecture is described in the following Fig 2. Fig 1. Categorization of Spatial datasets Thesee data sets are collated for the chattisgarhh state and are assigned to a grid of 1km X 1km, which is organized in a geo- spatial data server and served over the network to integratee with web application. The concept of Geo-web was introduced in Geoweb would be characterized by the self synchronization of network addressing, time and location. It allows location to be used to self organize all geospatially referenced data available throughh the Internet. Geospatial Web services have been developedd with the goal of sharing geospatial data and services among heterogeneous geospatial processing systems. Web Featuree Service (WFS), Web Map Servicee (WMS) and Web Coveragee Service (WCS) are the most fundamental geospatial Web services which are introduced by Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)[1]. Various technological components that are used in this work are given below. PostGRESQL - POSTGIS - GeoServerr - PHP & Java Script - GeoRDBMS Spatial Extension Geo-spatial server Programming/Scripting Fig 2: Green India Application Architecture. The application is having tools for navigation, modules for connecting to spatial data servers and framing the multiple attribute based queries for the listed services available in the application. This application has a frame work for extending the multi criteria analysis along with the plant species. Using the network client application, the domain 2 P age

3 experts can identify the sites by building various criteria. A representation of the selection is given in Fig 3. Land cover Fragmentation and patchiness Vegetation Slope / aspect Spatial analysis Identification of location for afforestation Wasteland Degraded forest areas Soil resources Transformation to grid Climatic database Rainfall, temperature etc. Fig 3: Schematic representation of identification of sites for greening IV. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION Considering various aspects of database, technology, It also has layer control for toggling the layer visibility and architecture and functionalities the web application is changing the order for visualization purposes. Apart from that a developed incorporating the requirements. The interface is javascript module is written for getting the unique list of being explained in the Fig 4 and Fig 5. It is primarily attributes, which is eases the user for building his attribute developed using PHP and compatible for various web based query very easily. Subsequently the queried attributes browsers. Through this application, the online servers can be can be viewed and analyzed with supporting ground situation connected and the geo-web services can be accessed. The with the latest satellite Natural colour composite with good overlay of these geo-web services as map layer allows further spatial resolution as described in Fig 5. value addition of the data for its analysis. Fig 4: Interface with attribute browsing and building queries 3 P age

4 Fig 5: Client browser with selected sites with attributes and background data service The geoprocessing operation takes an input dataset, performs an operation on that dataset, and returns the result of the operation as an output dataset. It allows definition, management, and analysis of used to form decisions. Generalization and geoprocessing operations on geospatial were earlier restricted to complex software running on high-performance workstations[8]. But recent advancements in technology like webservices, web2.0, Geoweb, Mashup and many more has enabled geo-processing operations to move on server-side in a distributed and web accessible environment. Distributed web-based mapping forms another framework for accessible geo-processing applications. Complex operations can be executed on a server or middleware architecture based on OGC specifications compliant servers such as GeoServer [3]. The Open Geospatial Consortium Web Feature Service Interface Standard (WFS) provides an interface allowing requests for geographical features across the web using platform-independent calls. WFS is the extended version of OGC WMS which returns feature-level geospatial data to the web. The basic Web Feature Service allows querying and retrieval of features. The request generated by client is posted to the WFS server using HTTP, and the servers executes the request and returns fine-grained about geospatial features, at both the geometry and attribute levels as result. Use of WFS is very important and crucial for the current application as it needs to access the data both spatial and nonspatial and also necessary for subsequent interlayer based analysis. V. CONLUSION Customized GIS solutions are very useful for the domain experts for improving the data management, visualization and decision making. This application especially helps the forest officials to know the various parameters of terrain, climatic etc. Apart from that data also is available to know the man power availability and their socio economic conditions. Since this application is being online it is very useful to maintain transparence and quicken the decision making process by various officials distributed in various geographical locations. This application further shall be integrated with species to perform the Multi-criteria decision making for enhanced analysis. ACKNOWLEDGMENT Authors thank ISRO / DOS for providing to perform NAPCC study. Thanks to Director, NRSC and Deputy Director (RSA), NRSC and Various colleagues across various divisions of RSA, NRSC for their support at various stages of the project implementation. REFERENCES [1] Amirian, Ali A. Alesheikh, 2008.Implementation of a Geospatial Web service Using Web Services Technologies and Native XML Databases. web ref: [2] GIS Park. Accessed on July,11 [3] Geoserver. [4] IPCC AR4: [5] NAPCC : 4 P age

5 [6] Wastelands Atlas 2005, Wastelands Atlas of India, Ministry of Rural Development, Department of Land Resources, Govt. of India and National Remote Sensing Agency, Department of Space, Govt. of India. [7] Sayar, Marlon Pierce1 and Geoffrey Fox, Integrating AJAX Approach into GIS Visualization Web Services [8] Wolf, Kevin Howe. Web client Based Distributed Generalization and Geoprocessing. WebClientGeoprocessing.pdf. AUTHORS PROFILE. Mr. Sampath Kumar P: Working as Scientist SD at National Remote Sensing Centre, ISRO Hyderabad. He is M. Tech in Geoinformatics from IIT Kanpur and have specializations in spatial modeling and analysis and software development for GIS. Ms. Reedhi Shukla: Working as a Scientist SD at National Remote Sensing Centre, ISRO Hyderabad. She is B.Tech in computer science with specializations in software development for GIS (web and desktop based). Dr. Harish Karnatak: Working as a Scientist SE at Indian Institute of Remote Sensing, ISRO Dehradun. He is PhD in computer science and having more than 10years of experience in Geioinformatics and software development for various applications of natural resource management and disaster management. His area of specializations is enterprise and distributed GIS, web GIS, SDSS, spatial DBMS and open source GIS development and implementation. Dr C.S.Jha, Group Head, Forestry and Ecology Group, NRSC has contributed significantly in the field of Remote Sensing and GIS applications in Forestry and Environment in the last 2 decades.. He is basically a plant ecologist by training. He is also Coordinator for the National Carbon project. He has also been national PI for the Department of Biotechnology sponsered " Biodiversity Characterization at landscape level" as well as IBIn biodiversity portal. He ha salso contributed in the microwave applications for forest biomass estimations. 5 P age