Abstract:
Most government agencies in African countries produce geospatial datasets in analogue formats, thereby making it difficult to seamlessly share datasets within themselves. Lack of coordinated storage system, varying formats, overlaps and duplication are some of the attended issues that easily come along. A prototype interactive Web Mapping Services (WMS) was designed and implemented with case study carried out on Ondo State for the Nigeria’s Geo-spatial Data Infrastructure. A conceptual architectural framework was also designed for the collaboration between the agencies. The research adopted the interactive model language contained in Lightweight Coordinate Calculus for easy data sharing between GIS service provider and GIS service requestor. Universally acceptable Open Geospatial Consortium standard was used for the datasets formats.GeoServer, GeoExt, QGIS, PostGIS, OpenLayers with Notepad++ for HTML and Java Scripting were the Open Source Solution used for the implementation. The datasets were styled. Pop-up windows that display information about the datasets, zoom in/out, pan, legend and so on were created. A map panel that forms a base for all the datasets with zoom centre on Ondo State was used, as the interface wrapper and tied to the user interface application. The capability metadata document that can be used by both GIS service provider and GIS service request for data sharing were finally generated. The research recommends that each government agency in the country should implement WMS/WFS at least locally on their Intranet to test-run their services before going on-line. Also that Open Source Solution should be an option for other African countries to consider in minimizing cost.
