Журнал дистанционного зондирования и ГИС

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GIS Web Services for Road Management System in Tigrai, Mekelle

Kidu Gebremedhin, Desta Luel

The development of road transport is one of the key features to an overall better standard of living; it is currently the heart of regional connectivity for the continents of Africa. Road management covers the activities of planning, designing, implementing, and decision makings for road development programs. In Tigrai, Ethiopia, road management is still managed in a poorly organized way, leading to data slow decision making processes. There are issues of data redundancy, inconsistency and incompleteness, no use of spatial technologies for spatial information as such, long processing time and inaccurate information is implemented. The objective of this study was to explore the role of new and emerging Geographic information System (GIS) technologies, explicitly Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) web services for road management and thereby supports the planning and management functions of the The research started by assessing the status of current road management and planning activities using questionnaires, interviews, observation and consulting existing documents. The study then reviewed the current trends of SOA web services for effective road management and planning. System design which includes use case, activity diagrams were modeled using Unified Modeling Language (UML) and creation of shape files for map files were done. Next, the SOA web service prototype was developed using map server with p-mapper scripts. Various queries using map server scripts were developed and tested. Results were used as a baseline in order to develop the system that can be implemented in reality. This study showed how such a system can be developed with low-cost available technologies. The method can be adopted to develop road management and planning in other cities of the country. The prototype is simple to use and facilitates searching roads’ information in space and time supported by interactive analytical tools.