Customization of GIS Tools through Web-based Open Source GRASS Interface

Abstract

The expertise on certain details relating to certain locations could only be provided through the expenditure of valuable time, money and effort with the expert having to survey the land manually or obtain the information about the place through complicated procedure. A simple decision support system where the expert selects any combination of unions of maps provided from a remote location and provides his suggestion based on the data retrieved from the unioned map. The user then locally accesses the system and selects the appropriate unioned map. The combined map is displayed in a window and using a cursor, he selects the location of interest. Thus, our application helps in the simplification of procedures and an economical way of obtaining expert advice on problems being faced by the common man without the need for either the expert or the customer to know the complex inner operations of the system.

Keywords: GIS, GRASS, SQL, PHP, mapserver, apache webserver