Description

A Web-GIS application for the Turtle Mountain Monitoring Project has been created to enhance public awareness of the hazards and monitoring of the mountain, its effect on the surrounding communities, and efforts by the Alberta government to mitigate damage similar to that caused by the rockslide in 1903 that buried portions of the town of Frank. That event is now known as the ‘Frank Slide.’
This Web-GIS application was designed to create a user-friendly web interface for the public to display and manipulate available data on the area. These data, organized as map layers, include historical monitoring stations, sensor networks, bedrock geology, orthophoto and digital elevation model of Turtle Mountain, urban infrastructure and hydrography. They can turn on and off different map layers, navigate around the area of interest, retrieve data, and create charts with sensor readings.
Implementation of the design was a challenging exercise. It was our first attempt to create a customized Web-GIS application with ArcGIS® Server and Web Application Developer Framework (ADF) in Microsoft® .NET Framework. In addition, this application incorporates many GIS functions created by the user community, a non-GIS charting tool and a 3-D visualization utility. We gained considerable valuable experience during this development process. An overview of our application architecture and implementation is documented in the technical section, and source code of our main template and different tools are provided in the appendices.