Open Source Geospatial Technologies for Generation of Water Resource Development Plan

Abstract

Water is a scarce natural resource that necessitates sustainable planning and management. Geospatial technology is capable of generating and analyzing geospatial data to produce water resource development (WRD) plans at watershed level. The generation of a WRD plan is a complex process involving the aggregation of multiple thematic layers based on some criteria. Hence, to accomplish the task easily, the complex logics are to be combined in a geospatial tool. In the recent past, much free and open source software for geographic information system (GIS) has been developed that facilitates the storage, analysis, and visualization of geographic data. The significance of the present chapter is that it discusses two case studies for the development of a customized WRD plan generation tool using free and open source GIS software. The first demonstrates the usage of the open source MapWindowGIS component for developing a desktop-based customized GIS tool in stand-alone mode. The second discusses how open source Web GIS technologies can be used to develop a customized web application for generating a WRD plan of an area. The importance of MapWindowGIS is that it allows users to develop customized GIS tools in addition to its existing toolsets. This feature is very useful for desktop-based spatial data analysis. However, the development of a web-based tool requires a different set of open source software: Postgres/PostGIS for spatial data management, Apache web server for hosting the application, GeoServer for sharing of spatial layers, and OpenLayers library for query and analysis of spatial data. The present study was carried out using the geospatial data of three districts of Jharkhand state, India. The potential of free and open source geospatial software for the generation of WRD plans in both stand-alone and web-enabled mode is successfully demonstrated in this chapter.