Multicriteria Spatial Decision Analysis in Web GIS Environment

Abstract

Internet, a client/server system, is a perfect means of GIS data accessing, analyzing and transmission. The World Wide Web, FTP (file transfer protocol) and HTTP programs make it convenient to access and transfer data files across the Internet. Using Internet for GIS makes it easy access to acquire GIS data from diverse data sources in the distributed environment. The geospatial multicriteria decision analysis in a client/server environment is an important and challenging task for the GIS community because of narrow Internet bandwidth for large geospatial data sets. In the present paper, we are developing a multicriteria decision analysis tool for spatial decision making in the web GIS environment. The developed system has been demonstrated for biodiversity conservation and priorities. An attempt has been made to generate the alternative decisions based on priority vectors. The multicriteria technique of Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is used to derive the eigen vectors with the given multiple constraints of conflicting criteria and aims at selecting optimal alternative from the available sets. However, the evaluation recognizes the importance of expert knowledge when assigning the weights for the best spatial priorities. Comparing within classes and alternatives using judgment and decision matrix is based on Saaty's Pairwise Comparison. The Multicriteria Spatial Decision Support System (MC-SDSS) software development uses ASP, ArcIMS 9.0, ArcSDE9.0 and Oracle 9i data server in the web GIS environment. The database organization of spatial and non-spatial data is done in the RDBMS environment using ArcSDE and Oracle 9i data server.