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Development of Web Based Rural Utility System Using Open Source

Geospatial Tool

Conference Paper · June 2015

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 OSGEO-India: FOSS4G 2015 - Second National Conference "OPEN SOURCE GEOSPATIAL TOOLS IN CLIMATE CHANGE RESEARCH AND
NATURAL RESOURCES MANAGEMENT” 8-10TH JUNE 2015

Development of Web Based Rural Utility System

Using Open Source Geospatial Tool

Praveen Kalura Dr. K. Venkata Reddy

PG student, Dept. Of Civil Engineering, Assistant Professor, Dept. Of Civil Engineering
National Institute of Technology Warangal National Institute of Technology Warangal
Warangal, India [email protected] Warangal, India, [email protected]

J. Pragnya S.Thiyaku
PG student, Dept. Of Civil Engineering PG student, Dept. Of Civil Engineering
National Institute of Technology Warangal National Institute of Technology Warangal
Warangal, India, [email protected] Warangal, India, [email protected]

Abstract— The planning and execution of any economic policy for

a nation like India has to begin with villages. Government of II. COMPONENTS OF WEB GIS
India has recently launched new programmes like ‘Digital India’ Various components of Web GIS are Database, Server, Map
which is an initiative to create the digital infrastructure, digital
viewer and SDK.
literacy; and ‘Sansad Adarsh Gram Yojana’ which is a rural
development programme broadly focusing upon the development A. Database
in the villages. Rural utility management system serves as an
efficient system, designed to customize and integrate web GIS
The common database for GIS is standard database
system based on open source tools for effective dissemination, management systems (DBMS) with spatial extensions. There
sharing and management of spatial information related to are two well-known free databases available: PostgreSQL and
utilities in village and its development. The present study deals MySQL. The PostgreSQL with the extension PostGIS better
with the development of web interface for utility system for supports the OGC standard than the MySQL. Hence the
Gangadevipalli village in Telangana by using open source PostgreSQL is opted for the case study.
geospatial tools such as Openlayer and Geoserver. This Web
interface will help the local people and the administration to B. Server
efficiently manage and develop the existing utilities of this village. Server is used to get the client requests and respond according
to the requests. The GIS servers considered are Mapserver and
Keywords-WebGIS; FOSS4G; Geoserver; QGIS; PostGIS:
Geoserver. Mapserver lacks the transactional feature for the
WFS and has less architectural overhead with respect to
I. INTRODUCTION Geoserver. Moreover Geoserver provides interactive GUI,
hence the Geoserver is opted.
GIS applications are critical to many aspects of governance
and nation building and can help in economic and social C. Map Viewer
development. Village WebGIS utility mapping system can
Browser support without plugin is considered for choosing
help local authority in Decision making and development of
map viewer and Asynchronous JavaScript and Extensible
these utilities. The web applications are advantageous in
Markup Language (AJAX) based map viewer is preferred as it
platform independency, low cost of data distribution and
reduces the processing bandwidth. The Open Layers is chosen
sharing of the Geospatial information. The development of
as the map viewer because it is one of the most popular
Web GIS architecture using Open Source Web GIS tools like
viewers and supports WMS, WFS, KML, GeoRSS and GML.
Geoserver, PostGIS and OpenLayers allows the user to
It also provides API for Google Maps and Bing Maps.
operate the system without any prior knowledge of GIS. This
paper is aimed to provide a method for visualizing the
geospatial data on web using a combination of FOSS4G tools.

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 OSGEO-India: FOSS4G 2015 - Second National Conference "OPEN SOURCE GEOSPATIAL TOOLS IN CLIMATE CHANGE RESEARCH AND
NATURAL RESOURCES MANAGEMENT” 8-10TH JUNE 2015

D. Software Development Kit (SDK)

Software Development Kit is a set for software development
tools used to create the applications. Boundless SDK is used
to build and deploy web mapping applications based on the
JavaScript. This involves five stages creation, customization,
testing, packing and deployment of the application. The
application is packaged as web archive (WAR) and can be
deployed in the application server.

III. METHODOLOGY

Methodology adopted for the creation of the web application

consists of data preparation, Database Management,
publishing data to spatial server and Application development. Figure 2. Layer preview in OpenLayers.

A. Data Preparation
ESRI Shapefiles were created by digitizing the High D. Application Development
Resolution Google Earth Imagery and field survey. The
styling and editing of shapefiles was done using QGIS which Boundless SDK was used to create the web Application. The
is open Source desktop application. application was created in gxp application template which is
based on gxp, geoext and openlayer javascript libraries.

B. Database Management
GIS database management: Spatial database in PostgreSQL
was created by shapefile loading Tool pgShapeloader. The
pgShapeloader makes shape data usable in PostGIS by
converting it from binary data into a series of SQL commands
that are then run in the database to load the data.

Figure 3. Default Interface created by SDK.

IV. CUSTOMIZATION OF APPLICATION

The openness and flexibility of the web platform enables
customizations that would not have been possible on the
desktop. We can use OpenLayers JavaScript libraries to
customize our web application.
A. Adding new Base Map
Once the application was created by SDK, it was run in debug
mode on localhost. The basic default viewer which was
created is shown in fig 3 which contain OpenStreetMap as
Figure 1. Database created in postgreSQL
base layer. First we set the Base layers center point and Zoom
level which enable application to show the area of interest
everytime we start the application.
C. Spatial Server
Geoserver was used to publish shapefiles which were
imported from PostGIS. Fig 2 shows the open layer preview;

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 OSGEO-India: FOSS4G 2015 - Second National Conference "OPEN SOURCE GEOSPATIAL TOOLS IN CLIMATE CHANGE RESEARCH AND
NATURAL RESOURCES MANAGEMENT” 8-10TH JUNE 2015

B. Adding Various Shapefiles of utilities

Various ESRI shapefiles were added like houses, roads,
streeghtlight, drainage, pipelines, powerlines and village
boundary. These shapefiles were published using Geoserver
and were used in the application as WMS and WFS services.
C. Customization of spatial tools
Zoom to Layer Extent is used to zoom to full extent of a
particular layer. So this tool was added to the toolbar on top
of the layer tree, and to the context menu that appears when
we right-click on a layer in the tree.

Figure 6. Use of Edit existing feature tool.

Create New feature tool allows (fig 7) users to create new

feature which would be added to the exisisting utility
system.We can fill all the required fields and then that feature
would be updated in in the geoserver layer.

Figure 4. Zoom to layer extent tool

Next step of customization was to add various tools to the

application source code which was stored in app.js file.
Various tools were added to interface like WMS
GetFeatureInfo tool, Google Geocoder search field, Create
New Feature tool, Edit existing feature tool and Manage Layer
Style tool.
Figure 7. Use of Create new Feature tool

Final web Interface created are shown in Fig 8 and Fig 9.

Figure 5. Customized tools added to web interface

Edit existing feature tools (fig 6) can be used to edit the

existing features which we want to change for updation. It will
show all the details associated with the feature in the attribute
table of selected feature.
Figure 8. Web Interface with Google satellite imagery as basemap.

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 OSGEO-India: FOSS4G 2015 - Second National Conference "OPEN SOURCE GEOSPATIAL TOOLS IN CLIMATE CHANGE RESEARCH AND
NATURAL RESOURCES MANAGEMENT” 8-10TH JUNE 2015

[5] Jyothi, S., Vimal, S., 2012, Web – based solution for Mapping
Application using Open – Source Software Server, Int. J. Informatics
and Communication Technology, 1(2), 91-99.
[6] Bandyophadyay, M., M. Pratap Singh, and V. Singh. "Integrated
visualization of distributed spatial databases an open source web-gis
approach." Recent Advances in Information Technology (RAIT), 2012
1st International Conference on. IEEE, 2012.

AUTHORS PROFILE
Mr. Praveen Kalura: Pursuing M.tech in RS and GIS, NIT
Warangal,He has obtained B.Tech Degree in Civil Engineering from
Graphic Era University,Dehradun in 2012. He worked as Lecturer for 2
years (2012-2014) at GEU. His research areas of interest are Open
Source GIS technologies,WebGIS and Water Resources Engineering
Systems.

K.Reddy : Dr. K. Venkata Reddy is Assistant Professor at NIT

Warangal. He has obtained Ph.D. degree From IIT Bombayin 2006. His
Figure 9. Web Interface with OpenStreetMap as basemap area of interest are Watershed Modelling Systems, Numerical and Soft
Computing Methods, Climate Change Impact Studies and Geospatial
Techniques and its Applications in Rural Development

V. CONCLUSIONS J.Pragnya: Pursuing M.tech in RS and GIS, NIT Warangal,She has

obtained B.tech Degree in Civil Engineering from VNR VJIET
In this paper a basic web application was developed for village Hyderabad,Telangana.Her research area of interest are Remote sensing,
WebGIS Utility mapping system for Gangadevipalli village. Open Source GIS technologies,WebGIS ,Water Resources Engineering
Systems,She has published 3 research papers in conference proceedings.
The paper focus on the use of FOSS4G tools to develop
interactive WebGIS applications also the process and methods
S. Thiyaku: Pursuing M.tech in RS and GIS, Nit Warangal. He has
of comprehensively using Geoserver, PostgreSQL, PostGIS obtained B.Tech in Civil Engineering from GCT Coimbatore .His
and GeoExplorer, OpenLayers for creat WebGIS applications. research area of interest are Web GIS,Python tools for GIS,Climate
Use of open source technologies provides a low cost solution change and Watershed Management.
for web publishing of geographic information.

Further work includes adding more geospatial tools like

measure, buffer, union, intersection, etc. and higher level of
customization of the interface.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Authors are thankful to Mrs. Y. Navatha for providing
Gangadevipalli village spatial and non-spatial data for the
study.
REFERENCES
[1] Kodge, Bheemashankar Gurupadayya, and Prakash Hiremath. "Web
based Geo-Spatial and Village Level Information Extraction System
using FOSS."Journal of Advances in Information Technology 3.4
(2012): 222-227.
[2] Y.Navatha, K. Venkatareddy, Deva pratap, Mallikarjuna, Hemendra,
Planning of Infrastructural Facilities of a Rural Area Using Geospatial
Database, National Seminar on sustainable development of rural India
2012 at NITTR, Chandigarh, 7-8,March 2013.
[3] Navatha Y., Venkata Reddy, K., Deva Pratap.,PrashanthBabu, D.C. and
Jayatheja, A., 2012, Development of 3D rural geospatial database using
high resolution satellite images, GIS, total station and GPS, J.
Geomatics, 6(2).
[4] Sunil, P.S and Preetvanti, S., 2014, Mapping Spatial Data on Web Using
Free and Open –Source Tools: A Prototype Implementation, J.
Geographic Information System, 6, 30-39.

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