GRASS (Geographical Resource Analysis Support System) was used to provide the basic GIS framework.GRASS GIS was originally developed at the United States Army, Construction Engineering ResearchLaboratory. Presently, the development and distribution is coordinated by the GRASS Development Team(http://www.geog.uni-hannover.de/grass/ index2.html) and is made available under the GNU GeneralPublic License (http://www.gnu.org). GRASS is a hybrid vector-raster GIS designed to provide digitizing,image processing, map production, and GIS system capabilities to its user. GRASS contains severalroutines for importing spatial data of a wide variety of commonly used formats. GRASS files can also bedirectly imported into many commercially available GIS packages or exported to suitable data formats. Thespatial data included in prototype system consists of GRASS raster, vector and site data layers thatprovide the geographical reference.
RDBMS Component
RDBMS enables the fast storage and retrieval of large amounts of information. The interface that is used toinsert, manipulate, and extract data is called the Structured Query Language (SQL). In case of theprototype system, the PostgreSQL database server has been used to manage the attribute data and multi-media content (e.g. image files). PostgreSQL is an Object-Relational DBMS, supporting almost all SQLconstructs, including sub-selects, transactions, and user-defined types and functions. The databaseconsists of tables that hold all the available attribute data. The attribute table includes fields that can beused to store binary data (images, multi-media contents etc.). Remote update of the database by permittedusers is also made possible. An authentication mechanism to check which users can be allowed to enter new data or update the existing attribute data in the relational database is also provided.
Web Component
The system includes of two kinds of web interfaces that enable online access to the GIS layers andattribute information. Access to spatial data (GRASS database) is provided using the GRASSLinksinterface (HUSE 1995) and PHP (PHP Hypertext Preprocessor) is used as an interface to access theattribute data (PostgreSQL). Since a majority of GRASS commands can be executed in the commandmode, it is quite easy to enhance the GRASSLinks interface to provide added functionality to the system.In prototype system, several additional features were incorporated into the GIS web-interface to tailor thesystem for its present requirements. PHP is a server-side scripting language. PHP scripts are includedwithin an HTML document to confer it the capacity of generating web contents on demand. BothGRASSLinks and PHP are distributed under the GNU General Public License and can be deployed onvariety hardware platforms. PHP can be used to connect to several database engines such asPostgreSQL, MySQL etc.
System Features
An online demonstration of the basic features is available at http://gisws.media.osaka -cu.ac.jp/slink/.“Spatial Query” option allows the user to retrieve attribute data from the RDBMS table by selecting alocation on the raster image displayed on the web browser. The user selects the GRASS data layers froman interactive menu based on which the GRASS raster layer is displayed on the web-browser. The user can also select vector maps and site data as overlays for raster map layer (Figure 2). Interactive zoom/pancapability allows the user to view the displayed maps in greater details or to choose different areas for display. Once the desired area is displayed on the web-browser, the user is allowed to view the attributetable by “clicking” on respective site. The relation database is queried based on the geographical location(Figure 3a) of the “clicked” site. Attribute data is displayed in two stages. Firstly, a brief summary (Figure3b) of the attribute information is presented. The summary table also includes a hypertext link, which canbe followed to view more detailed information including figures and field photographs is also provided(Figure 4a and 4b).
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