Geographic Resources Decision Support System – an Open Source GIS

Fully structured and matured open source spatial and temporal analysis technology seems to be the official carrier of the future for planning of the natural resources especially in the developing nations. This technology has gained enormous momentum because of technical superiority, affordability and ability to join expertise from all sections of the society. Sustainable development of a region depends on the integrated planning approaches adopted in decision making which requires timely and accurate spatial data. With the increased developmental programmes, the need for appropriate decision support system has increased in order to analyse and visualise the decisions associated with spatial and temporal aspects of natural resources. In this regard Geographic Information System (GIS) along with remote sensing data support the applications that involve spatial and temporal analysis on digital thematic maps and the remotely sensed images. Open source GIS would help in wide scale applications involving decisions at various hierarchical levels (for example from village panchayat to planning commission) on economic viability, social acceptance apart from technical feasibility. GRASS (Geographic Resources Analysis Support System, http://wgbis.ces.iisc.ernet.in/grass) is an open source GIS that works on Linux platform (freeware), but most of the applications are in command line argument, necessitating a user friendly and cost effective graphical user interface (GUI). Keeping these aspects in mind, Geographic Resources Decision Support System (GRDSS) has been developed with functionality such as raster, topological vector, image processing, statistical analysis, geographical analysis, graphics production, etc. This operates through a GUI developed in Tcltk (Tool command language / Tool kit) under Linux as well as with a shell in X-Windows. GRDSS include options such as Import /Export of different data formats, Display, Digital Image processing, Map editing, Raster Analysis, Vector Analysis, Point Analysis, Spatial Query, which are required for regional planning such as watershed Analysis, Landscape Analysis etc. This is customised to Indian context with an option to extract individual band from the IRS (Indian Remote Sensing Satellites) data, which is in BIL (Band Interleaved by Lines) format. The integration of PostgreSQL (a freeware) in GRDSS aids as an efficient database management system.

On Pushing Multilingual Query Operators into Relational Engines

To effectively support today’s global economy, database systems need to manage data in multiple languages simultaneously. While current database systems do support the storage and management of multilingual data, they are not capable of querying across different natural languages. To address this lacuna, we have recently proposed two cross-lingual functionalities, LexEQUAL[13] and SemEQUAL[14], for matching multilingual names and concepts, respectively. In this paper, we investigate the native implementation of these multilingual functionalities as first-class operators on relational engines. Specifically, we propose a new multilingual storage datatype, and an associated algebra of the multilingual operators on this datatype. These components have been successfully implemented in the PostgreSQL database system, including integration of the algebra with the query optimizer and inclusion of a metric index in the access layer. Our experiments demonstrate that the performance of the native implementation is up to two orders-of-magnitude faster than the corresponding outsidethe- server implementation. Further, these multilingual additions do not adversely impact the existing functionality and performance. To the best of our knowledge, our prototype represents the first practical implementation of a crosslingual database query engine.