Park Information System for Kolkata: A Low Cost Web Enabled Solution

Abstract

Green parks in urban environment play an important role in promoting public health, art, culture, tourism and economy. City dwellers require information about the parks to get the benefit of green spaces. Web GIS technology has a potential to maintain inventory and disseminate spatial and aspatial information over the Internet. Open source software enables cost effective and feature rich implementation, operation and maintenance of Web GIS application. In this study an efficient approach is presented for developing an open source Web GIS application based on Geoserver as a web GIS server and PostgreSQL/PostGIS as an object oriented relational database management system (ORDBMS). Open layer is used to deploy the mapping contents to the web application. HTML together with PHP and JavaScript is used for developing the interactive user interface for effective dissemination, sharing and management of park information of Kolkata city. The application plots locations of parks along with name and ground photographs over high resolution satellite images. It enables to search and navigate the map based on ward, borough, and postal index number (PIN). It also facilitates to identify features, measure the distance between points and area of the object in the map in web environment. This application is found to be useful for city dwellers and green parks conservation.

Keywords: Park, Geoserver, open source, WebGIS, Kolkata

 Cite this Article

Arati Paul, Debasish Chakraborty, Dibyendu Dutta, Prabir Kumar Das, Mallika Jalan, Siddharth Chettri, Nirpendra Shrestha, Shruti Menon. Park Information System for Kolkata: A Low Cost Web Enabled Solution. Current Trends in Information Technology. 2016; 6(1):35–39p.