See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/353764564

Requirements Elicitation and Development of a Graveyard Management System

in the Context of Bangladesh

Conference Paper · August 2021

DOI: 10.1109/ICSCT53883.2021.9642654

CITATION READS

1 277

4 authors:

Maliha Sultana Nourin Khandaker

University of Alberta Bangladesh University of Business and Technology
4 PUBLICATIONS 48 CITATIONS 1 PUBLICATION 0 CITATIONS

SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE

Tasmiah Tamzid Anannya Muhammad Nazrul Islam

Military Institute of Science and Technology Military Institute of Science and Technology
21 PUBLICATIONS 101 CITATIONS 181 PUBLICATIONS 1,878 CITATIONS

SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

Design and Development of an Intelligent Seed Germination System Based on IoT View project

Research Methodology View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Muhammad Nazrul Islam on 28 June 2022.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

 Requirements Elicitation and Development of a
Graveyard Management System in the Context of
Bangladesh
Maliha Sultana ∗ , Nourin Khandaker† , Tasmiah Tamzid Anannya, Muhammad Nazrul Islam
Department of Computer Science and Engineering,
Military Institute of Science and Technology,
Mirpur Cantonment, Dhaka-1216, Bangladesh
Email: ∗ malihasultana998@gmail.com, † nourinkhandaker7@gmail.com
Abstract— Rapid urbanization is currently taking place
all over the world, including Bangladesh. Dhaka, the capital
of Bangladesh, suffers from a lack of cemetery maintenance
because of this. Moreover, manual approaches are practiced
to manage these graveyards and documentations are done
on paper which is very time-consuming, difficult to maintain
and easy to lose. Thus, digitizing the graveyard management
system is of utmost importance in order to store and access
graveyard management related information whilst ensuring
its effectiveness, efficiency and user-satisfaction. The objective
of this article is to elicit the requirements and develop a
graveyard management system in the context of Bangladesh. To
attain these objectives, a set of functional and non-functional
requirements was collected through field visit and structured
survey. Next, a conceptual framework was proposed considering
the requirements identified and finally, following the proposed
conceptual framework, a web based graveyard management
system was developed in the context of Bangladesh. The
developed system facilitates to preserve the cemetery records
related to graves, buried individuals etc. in a structured way and
at the same time, manage and monitor the finance, inventory
and employee related information of a graveyard.
Keywords—Graveyard, cemetery records, database manage-
ment system, automation, requirement elicitation, Bangladesh,
digital solution
I. I NTRODUCTION
Nowadays, people are migrating from rural to urban areas
at an alarming rate around the world. This trend results in
rapid urbanization which requires extensive urban develop-
ment planning [1]. Because of this fast-paced urbanization, the
urban societies of Bangladesh and mainly its capital, Dhaka,
are experiencing a rise in the number of migrant dwellers who
are primarily in search of a livelihood [2]. This increase in
urban population is evident from the fact that the growth rate of
urban population of Bangladesh alone was around 3% back in
the year 2013 [3]. In order to manage such a huge population
by providing various services effectively, the city of Dhaka
needs efficient IT systems that can store and provide access
to data reliably and quickly.
978-1-6654-2132-4/21/$31.00 ©2021 IEEE
Cemeteries are an essential part of every urban commu-
nity [4]. This is why regular urbanization management and
planning should give equal importance in deciding where
the dead will reside. For this, information related to all
the graveyards in the city (like number of available graves,
privately owned graves, graves that are temporary/reusable
etc.) as well as information related to the deceased should be
efficiently stored and readily available. With the rapid growth
in urban population, the importance of managing cemetery
areas in Dhaka city accurately and effectively using digital
graveyard management systems has grown exponentially.
A number of digital systems to manage graveyards exist
but most of them are developed and deployed in developed
countries. One such example is the cemetery website of Napier
Council [5]. It has a search option for the external users who
can easily track down their deceased relatives and the graves
in which they are buried. It also has an option to reserve
graves and contact officials for funeral arrangements. Another
example is the Nebraska Gravestone [6] which is a portal for
searching gravestones which can be done surname wise or
cemetery wise. But it lacks the ability to provide the users
with the information of their ancestors as it only contains
the images of the gravestones. Similarly, another portal called
“Find a Grave” [7] provides user with several functionalities
such as searching graves using specific location or date.
However, at present, in Bangladesh, information related
to the burial of the deceased, number of graves, current
employees and all sorts of transaction is stored manually.
The current system of keeping records in the cemeteries of
Bangladesh is becoming obsolete and preservation of year
old documents is becoming cumbersome. As a result, change
is inevitable, and thus, the records must be transferred from
a manual filing system to a database management system.
This will benefit both the users and the employees because
all the records will be centralized in one location. Again,
although a number of studies have been conducted focusing on
digitizing various systems in the context of Bangladesh [8]–
[11], none of them have focused to design, develop and adopt
a digital solution for graveyard management in the context of
Bangladesh.
 With that in mind, the aim of this paper is to propose a
graveyard management system in the context of Bangladesh
which will digitally preserve the cemetery records related to
the graves, buried individuals etc. in a structured way and
at the same time help to manage and monitor the finance,
inventory and employee related information of a particular
graveyard. The system also ensures security and integrity of
the data by restricting access as per user privilege.
We have organized our paper as follows- Section II gives
an idea about the related works that have been carried out.
Section III describes the features, conceptual design and
implementation along with the work flow of our proposed
approach. The overall discussion has been added in Section
V. Section VI presents the limitation and future expansion of
our system. Finally, Section VII concludes the paper.
II. R ELATED W ORKS
This section briefly discusses the works related to the
digitization of graveyard management systems.
In different countries worldwide, cemetery records are pre-
served online in a structured way, thus providing a fast, easy
and efficient service. The e-Cemetery Portal developed by Sien
et al. [12] in Malaysia aimed to increase the efficiency of
the already existing cemetery management systems and was
later tested and validated by a total of 10 respondents in
order to identify its limitations. The web portal was developed
using the Rapid Application Development (RAD) approach in
order to digitized the roles of the e-Cemetery target users and
enhance the cemetery management protocol in Malaysia.
Similarly, a multilingual pilot graveyard information web
portal named E-Mem has been developed by Johannsson et al.
[13] for enabling ubiquitous exchange of graveyard and related
information over the internet for managing and providing ser-
vices of modern cemeteries whilst defining the best practices
for displaying such information. It essentially serves as a
uniform communication and graveyard management platform
for the whole of Europe by using one standard to display
information related to the cemeteries. For this, the authors
used GPS and EDM units, GIS mapping, SQL database and
even integrated a number of pilot cemeteries in the pool of
the portal.
Likewise, the Waqf cemetery information system [14] is a
web-based system which followed the waterfall model to carry
out field study with the purpose of creating a complete and
accurate database describing the real conditions of the Waqf
cemetery land. It made the process of searching, reporting and
obtaining statistical data regarding Waqf/ individual/ private
cemetery lands more efficient in Indonesia.
Again, both Lee et al. [15] and Lazzar-Atwood et al. [16]
have used Geographic Information Systems (GIS) platform
to digitize the grave management systems in Korea and
the US respectively. Lee et al. [15] proposed a GIS-based
grave management system for the administrative management
of individual cemeteries to provide support for time-limited
burial system and to manage cemeteries for those with no
relatives by constructing the database with grave-related po-
sition/attribute information collected by administrative system
or direct survey; while Lazzar-Atwood et al. [16] proposed
a GIS platform to digitize current records of the Edmonds
Memorial Cemetery and integrated the spatial data into the
current cemetery management scheme for stream lined record
keeping and a user-friendly interface to facilitate public access
to such records.
However, to the best of our knowledge, no such initiative
has yet been taken in Bangladesh which is why the country is
still vastly lagging behind in this regard. Thus, this research
focuses to design and develop a graveyard management system
in the context of Bangladesh.
III. R EQUIREMENT E LICITATION AND C ONCEPTUAL
F RAMEWORK
This section discusses the entire design process for an au-
tomated graveyard management system. The proposed system
has a number of features to overcome the limitations of the
existing system in Bangladesh.
A. Requirement Analysis
Understanding the requirements is a primary activity to de-
velop an efficient and usable digital solution [17], [18]. In this
research, we have adopted the field visit and structured survey
approach to collect the requirements. As part of our field-visit,
we had visited the Azimpur graveyard in Dhaka. Once there,
we collected in-depth information about the current structure
and examined samples of their register book and other related
documents. After that, we conducted a brief structured survey
to learn more about the existing employees’ needs and views
on digitizing the cemetery management system. The survey
responses were collected from the employees of the grave-
yards in Dhaka city. The findings of requirement analysis are
summarized and presented in Table I.
A conceptual framework (see Figure 1) is proposed con-
sidering the findings of requirement analysis and keeping in
mind its privacy and security aspects.
B. Actors of the System
The actors in the proposed solution are people or or-
ganizations who have an interest in or concern about this
automated system. The main stakeholders of the system and
their roles/privileges are as follows:
1) External User: External user refers to the general public
who will be able to visit the website and view public
information regarding the graveyard from the central
database. For example, search for deceased individuals
buried in this graveyard. They can not access any other
part of the system.
2) System Administrator: This refers to the individual in
charge of the system. Only the system admin can
add/remove users in/from the system and assign them
with different levels of privilege. Users can only ac-
cess/edit information that their privilege allows.
 TABLE I: Functional and non-functional requirements
a) Store and manage information of the buried individuals (name, cause and time of death, digital copy
of death certificate, association with other deceased individuals, location of grave etc.).
Functional
b) Store and manage information related to the graves in the graveyard (location, availability, reusability,
Requirements
cost etc.)
c) Store and manage information related to graveyard administration (fund, budget, expense, inventory
etc.)
d) Store and manage information of hired employees (attendance, salary, over time, bonus, leave etc.)
e) System should allow general public to view the list of buried individuals, list of associated deceased
individuals, list of available graves etc.
a) System should restrict user access to all features as per user defined roles. For example: system
Non- privilege of a general employee like a grave digger should be different from that of an accountant.
Functional b) System should maintain the security and privacy issues through proper authorization.
Requirements c) System should be user friendly.

C. Conceptual Framework

This section is focused on the conceptual framework of our

Fig. 1: The proposed conceptual framework
3) Employee: This refers to users who are direct employees
of the graveyard and have limited access to the system.
All the employees will have an individual account with
unique ID and password. Based on their level of privilege,
they can update the information of the database. The types
of employees considered for our system are as follows:
a) Accountant: Accountants will be responsible for man-
aging the graveyard fund, donation, donor information,
update inventory and employee payroll. They will be
able to see how much fund the graveyard has, amount
of stock materials and everything related to budget.
b) Registrar: Registrars will be able to handle graves and
deceased related information like number of available
graves, number of graves in use, number of reusable
graves, whether any relatives of a deceased are also
buried in the graveyard etc.
c) General Employee: This refers to employees like
guards, caretakers, seasonal employees, grave diggers,
gardeners, Imams etc. They will be able to view/update
their attendance, view their salary related information
etc.
proposed system that represents the key concepts which can be
used for knowing, understanding and simulating our system.
Some of the key features that our system offers are as follows:
1) List of Deceased: The list of all the deceased individuals
buried in the graveyard will be accessible along with
relevant information submitted during burial.
2) List of Associated Deceased: It keeps track of relatives of
a deceased individual who is also buried in that graveyard.
Thus, it becomes easy to trace the ancestors and family
members of an individual.
3) List of Graves: The system marks each grave as per their
location and shows the number of available graves, the
number of graves that are already in use and the number
of graves that are reusable (as graves can be reused after
2 years by Islami Shariah).
4) Maintenance of the system: There is an admin panel for
maintaining and keeping an eye on the overall system
such as adding/removing users, assigning user roles etc.
5) Authorization: Any member or employee of the graveyard
will need to log in using their unique ID and password
automatically generated by the system to access their
profile. Thus, their personal information will only be
accessible by them and their profiles will remain secured.
6) Managing fund and inventory: The graveyard fund may
come from non-government or government sources. This
fund management and budgeting is done by the ac-
countant.This fund is used to buy inventory for grave
renovation or for employee payroll. The system helps
to keep track of the inventory items by tracking the
purchase dates, name of purchaser, price, number of items
remaining etc.
7) Managing details about employees: Basic information of
employees related to their salary, leave and attendance is
maintained by this system.
IV. D EVELOPMENT OF THE S YSTEM
Several steps were followed to develop the graveyard man-
agement system.
A. System Outline Design
1) Structural Design: The first step of developing the auto-
mated system was designing a use case diagram given in
Figure 3. The use case diagram shows possible interaction
of all the stakeholders with the system. The whole system
can be divided into three sub-modules: External user sub-
module, Admin sub-module and Employee sub-module.
2) Database Design: Based on the use case diagram and pre-
vious analysis, this management system was transformed
in to a logical model by designing an entity relationship
diagram and schema diagram. After that, the database
has been implemented using Structured Query Language
(SQL) on ORACLE 11g platform.
Fig. 2: Home Page of the proposed system
B. System detailed implementation
The general design plan was created by the system’s out-
line design, the overall structure of the software system, the
functions of each sub-module and the interaction between the
modules decided through the rigorous requirements acquisition
and analysis.As for the front end, we have used PHP, HTML,
CSS and JAVASCRIPT. The home page of our website is given
in Figure 2. User can access the data from the website where
access to the data is limited according to the user role. These
restrictions have been implemented using different functions,
view, trigger, virtual columns and different constraints. The
database is quite secured as it contains enough user authenti-
cation and constraints to prevent unauthorized access so that
the valuable and confidential information is kept safely in the
database.A summary of the system requirements for running
the developed system has been given in Table II.
Figure 2 demonstrates the initial user interface of our
proposed system. The framework is a database management
system that has been combined with a web application to
make it easier for cemetery employees to use. The user
communicates with the system via the web application, while
all the documents are stored in the database.
V. D ISCUSSION
The aim of this paper was to digitise the graveyard man-
agement system in the context of Bangladesh. This was done
by dividing the various aspects of graveyard management into
realistic roles which can be implemented in managing real-
life graveyard databases. The proposed graveyard management
system developed in the context of Bangladesh will eliminate
the archaic and unreliable tradition of paper based record
keeping in graveyards whilst bringing a structure in managing
the administrative aspects common to almost every graveyards.
It is a step forward towards the digitization of this sector in
the context of Bangladesh. Possible implications of this system
includes:
1) Maintaining accuracy in record keeping: Storing cemetery
records digitally in the cloud eliminates situations like
duplicate, missing, incorrect and/or inconsistent entries.
As a result, accuracy of the data increases and it becomes
more reliable and stays up-to-date [19].
2) Efficiency in data storage, recovery and queries: Paper
based documents are prone to damage by age, wear
and tear. Moreover, fire, flood, tornado etc. can easily
cause loss of paper based records. A digital graveyard
management system eliminates these issues by ensuring
proper data storage and automatic backups of such valu-
able information. Moreover, by bringing structure to the
stored data, it becomes easy to quickly pull up records
and answer deceased/graveyard related queries [20].
3) Making digitized burial records available to the public:
Sharing the digital records as an online resource allows
the external users to access photographs, obituaries, burial
details etc. from any computer or smartphone and know
more about their deceased families and ancestors.
4) Controlling the access to records: The system ensures
security and integrity of the data by restricting access
to sensitive administrative and financial information of
the graveyard as per user privilege. Using such role-
based security makes sure that only permissible users are
allowed to enter and edit data [21].
5) Digitally tracking records of cemetery staff: This system
allows easy and accurate management and monitoring of
the employees, their attendance, payment, performance,
tasks etc. and brings structure to the overall administra-
tion of the graveyard.
6) Digitally tracking records of financial management: The
system allows easy and accurate tracking of the grave-
yard budget, donations, expenditures, payments, inven-
tory, stock etc. and brings structure to the overall financial
management of the graveyard.
VI. L IMITATIONS AND F UTURE E XPANSION
The current situation of Bangladesh’s graveyard database
management system is definitely not up to par. Bangladesh is
yet to digitize this sector, and thus has a very long way to go
before its graveyard management system can be deemed effi-
cient. The research provides opportunities to digitize various
aspects of graveyard management. Although this research has
many pros, it has a few limitations. For example, the system
is not integrate with any mapping technology. As a result, it
cannot geographically identify and show a plot of grave on
any digital maps. Moreover, a digitised payment process was
 Fig. 3: Use Case diagram of the proposed system

TABLE II: Summary of System Requirements for Running the System

Hardware Software
CPU2 x 1.6 GHz Microsoft Windows XP (or higher version of OS)
Disk space 20GB or higher (depends on the work load) Server
RAM minimum 256 MB Web Browser

not integrated with this system and so the option for external
users to digitally pay for burial, grave renovations or grave
reservation was not included.
In our future work, we plan on tackling these limitations
by using Geographical Information System (GIS) technology
in order to plot accurate locations of all the grave sites in an
interactive map with respect to their latitude and longitude for
easy detection [22]. We also plan on collaborating with various
banks and Mobile Financial Services (MFS) in order to digitise
and integrate the payment gateway with the system. This will
allow external users to easily avail the services provided by a
graveyard through digital payment.
Again, we recognize the importance and significance of
information related to the buried individuals in graveyards in
terms of keeping track of vital statistics like death rate, popu-
lation dynamics, mortality rates, common diseases and health
epidemics. As such, in order to help the government utilize
such valuable data for better management and monitoring of
the population and general health of Bangladesh, we plan on
integrating this system with relevant platforms like Office of
the Registrar General, Birth & Death Registration, Ministry of
Health and Family Welfare, ICDDRB etc.
 VII. C ONCLUSION
Till this date, the cemeteries in Bangladesh follow the old
and traditional method of documenting records manually on
paper. As a result, such valuable information is always at a risk
of getting lost, damaged or tampered with. Moreover, search-
ing through this huge volume of data is nearly impossible.
Digitization of the cemeteries of Bangladesh offers endless
opportunities to increase workflow and improve efficiency
in record keeping and overall management of graveyards.
Our proposed system is a step towards this direction. In this
paper, we discussed how the proposed web-based graveyard
management system structurally stores burial and grave related
records for quick and easy searches. At the same time, it
allows proper administrative and financial management and
monitoring of graveyards by identifying and implementing
role based access control to ensure data security. Similarly, it
allows the general public to easily access information related
to buried individuals and the graveyards online. In the future,
we plan on integrating the system with a mapping technology
as well as find ways to integrate it with government platforms
to help gather information related to death certificates, death
rate, number of graves etc.
R EFERENCES
[1] N. Morova, “Kent bilgi sistemi ve uygulaması: Atabey örneği,” Ph.D.
dissertation, SDÜ Fen Bilimleri Enstitüsü, 2006.
[2] M. Shikdar, “Impact of rural-urban migration on urban bangladesh,”
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2012.
[3] UNESCAP, “2013 escap population data sheet,” https:
//www.unescap.org/sites/default/files/SDD-PUB Datasheet-2013.pdf,
October 2013, (Accessed on 06/29/2021).
[4] A. Quamruzzaman, “Graveyards and urbanization: The case of dhaka
city,” SSRN Electronic Journal, 2009.
[5] N. C. Council, “Cemetery database — napier city council,” https:
//www.napier.govt.nz/services/napier-cemeteries/cemetery-database/,
(Accessed on 07/05/2021).
[6] “Nebraska gravestone photo project — search for nebraska grave-
stone photos, tombstone pictures, and burial records,” https://
nebraskagravestones.org/, (Accessed on 07/05/2021).
[7] “Find a grave - millions of cemetery records,” https://www.findagrave.
com/, (Accessed on 07/05/2021).
[13] H. Johannsson, M. Felicori, C. Borgatti, S. Caraceni, L. Garutti,
A. Vysniauskiene, I. Baliulyte, S. Zabiela, A. Sarris, and E. Peraki, “E-
mem: An interactive graveyard information management tool & virtual
memoriam database,” Proceedings of the 33rd Conference on Computer
View publication stats
[8] M. N. Islam and T. T. Inan, “Exploring the fundamental factors of
digital inequality in bangladesh,” SAGE Open, vol. 11, no. 2, p.
21582440211021407, 2021.
[9] M. M. Karim, A. Zavin, N. S. Khan, S. N. Tumpa, and M. N. Islam,
“A proposed multi-channel system for public libraries in bangladesh,”
in 2017 4th International Conference on Advances in Electrical Engi-
neering (ICAEE). IEEE, 2017, pp. 618–623.
[10] M. N. Islam, N. T. Promi, J. M. Shaila, M. A. Toma, M. A. Pushpo, F. B.
Alam, S. N. Khaledur, T. T. Anannya, and M. F. Rabbi, “Safeband: A
wearable device for the safety of women in bangladesh,” in Proceedings
of the 16th International Conference on Advances in Mobile Computing
and Multimedia, 2018, pp. 76–83.
[11] A. Sharif, M. H. Muaz, A. Kabir, K. Annatoma, T. T. Anannya,
M. M. Karim, M. Khatun, and M. N. Islam, “A proposed system
for automated electricity bill monitoring in context of bangladesh,” in
2018 International Conference on Computer, Communication, Chemical,
Material and Electronic Engineering (IC4ME2). IEEE, 2018, pp. 1–4.
[12] T. E. Sien and C. R. Ramachandiran, “e-cemetery portal: A tool
for digitizing the cemetery culture in malaysia,” Journal of Applied
Technology and Innovation, vol. 2, no. 1, 2018.
Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology, pp. 145–148,
2005.
[14] R. Komalasari, “The waqf cemetery information system,” in IOP Con-
ference Series: Materials Science and Engineering, vol. 879, no. 1. IOP
Publishing, 2020, p. 012035.
[15] J.-D. Lee and S.-H. Lee, “Construction and applicability of gis-based
grave management system,” Journal of the Korean Association of
Geographic Information Studies, vol. 14, no. 4, pp. 208–220, 2011.
[16] A. Lazzar-Atwood, “Applying a gis framework to the management of
the edmonds memorial cemetery,” Scholars Week, May 2017.
[17] M. N. Islam, M. A. Ahmed, and A. N. Islam, “Chakuri-bazaar: A mobile
application for illiterate and semi-literate people for searching employ-
ment,” International Journal of Mobile Human Computer Interaction
(IJMHCI), vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 22–39, 2020.
[18] S. Hoque, S. S. Sharmee, M. N. Islam, D. Shahrin, and F. Kabir, “Ponno
aalap: An interactive web portal for improving consumer experience,”
in 2020 IEEE Region 10 Symposium (TENSYMP). IEEE, 2020, pp.
1770–1774.
[19] OpusBlog, “7 tips for keeping cemetery records - blog - opusxenta,”
https://opusxenta.com/blog/7-tips-for-keeping-cemetery-records-1, Au-
gust 2020, (Accessed on 06/28/2021).
[20] CemSites, “Why cemeteries need management software - cemetery
software - management, mapping, sales,” https://cemsites.com/2015/08/
why-cemeteries-need-management-software/, August 2015, (Accessed
on 06/28/2021).
[21] R. S. Sandhu, “Role-based access control,” in Advances in computers.
Elsevier, 1998, vol. 46, pp. 237–286.
[22] D. K. Raczyński, “The usage of gis technology in development plan
of the parish graveyard in motycz,” Ph.D. dissertation, Zakład Fo-
togrametrii, Teledetekcji i Systemów Informacji Przestrzennej, 2019.