Identification of WebGIS Development Potential and Issues – A land and Water case Study Application for Moratuwa, Sri lanka

Abstract

Popularity of internet use is rapidly increasing. Hence, the demand is high for Web based GIS tools. The need to handle heavy maps and attribute datasets, often increase issues especially with respect to the time taken to serve maps and to filter user desired information for delivery. A WebGIS based land and water information management system was developed for a land extent of approximately 2.5km2 within the Moratuwa DSD of Sri Lanka. Information of roads, buildings were collected as land data while water and stream information were collected using an extensive field survey. The developed WebGIS application integrates digital base maps and feature attribute data of the selected case study area and facilitates operations through a user-interface while offering a variety of querying and reporting options. This application which was named GeoInfo WebGIS, possesses a very high potential to serve the users through i)Map to Map ii) Map to database iii) Database to Map and iv) Database to Database functions. The application was tested and verified through a consideration of user satisfaction and accuracy. GeoInfo WebGIS was developed on MS4W framework, PostgreSQL was used as the database. Non-responsive situations, high time consumption when loading the data layers, map overlaying issues and delay in refreshing the maps are performance issues identified through the application development.