The family welfare department, Government of Uttar Pradesh (GOUP) wishes to depict it's Primary Health Care Centers (PHC) and Sub-Centers on maps. It also wishes to show the villages which are being catered to by each Sub-Center.
REQUIREMENTS
Software and Customization
Since this is a mapping project where Spatial information is to be overlayed with symbolic representation of metadata, a Geographic Information System (GIS) is needed to fulfill the requirements. No existing software fulfilled the requirements as given below. Therefore, we decided to customize our PrithviGIS to deliver a solution to the Family Welfare Department.
Software customization required -
- Depiction by arrows of hierarchial relation between villages and sub-centers.
These arrows are generated on the fly from data provided to us in excel files. The excel files were first merged into a census database provided by the department. This merged database was linked to village polygons in maps. Customization in PrithviGIS software enables this data hierarchy to be depicted by arrows generated on the fly by PrithviGIS software.
- Highlight Villages which are not being catered to by any Sub-Center.
This involves searching through and highlighting polygons which have nulls in relevant field.
- Find an optimum placement of Sub-Centers such that all villages have a Sub-center near to them.
This is a Linear Programming problem. The algorithm makes use of centroids of village polygons to calculate distances between villages, and attempts to locate Sub-Centers in an optimum manner.
Mass data conversion, merging and manipulation
Data was supplied to us from 3 different sources -
- Spatial data given as paper maps, which contained village boundaries along with 3 digit village codes.
We have digitized these maps on PrithviGIS by scanning them, tracing, cleaniang the trace, and then building polygon topology. - Village name and population data in (many) excel files which contains the above village codes (in 7 digits) along with associated village names, population figures etc.
Since this was a very large dataset in a large number of excel files, we created a special software utility which opens the excel file, and transfers the data into mysql database. - Family Welfare data in a separate set of excel files which contains the full 7 digit village code, along with presence of various kinds of health care facilities.
Again, this is a very large dataset, and contains references which identify centers and their catered villages of the family welfare department. These reference ids need to be verified and validated before merging. Considering the size of the dataset involved, again we took the help of our software development skills and created a utility to load these excel files, validate the references and join into the above mysql database.
PrithviGIS was modified to attach a special data merge utility, which joins and brings in data from the database and displays immediately on creation of polygon and entry of it's id.
Digitization and data linking
This part of the requirement consisted of the following activities -
- Digitize (convert from paper to digital form), clean and build polygon topology for all village boundaries of Uttar Pradesh (there are around 100,000 villages in Uttar Pradesh).
- Attach data provided by the Family Welfare Department to the village boundaries digitized. PrithviGIS got thoroughly tested in meeting this requirement.
Technologies used :
- The PrithviGIS software (developed in Java by Prithvitech) as a base, customized as detailed above for this project.
- POI - a java api which can read .xls files for Excel to MYSQL conversion.
- Mass data manipulation - 100,000 village boundaries with attached name, population, and other figures.
- A custom Data import/merge/execute tool developed by Prithvitech explicitly for this project, which allows for easy and fast merging of data by non-programmers.