Geospatial Technologies in Development of Soil Information System and Prototype GeoPortal

Abstract

The availability of accurate, reliable and timely information on natural resources enable and rationalize the decision-making process by the decision makers, planners and resource managers. In this chapter, an attempt has been made to demonstrate the capabilities of geospatial technologies in development of Soil Information System (SIS) and prototype Geoportal to store, query, update, manage and visualize the spatial and non-spatial soil information of India on 1:250,000 scale and provide robust web map services. The available state wise soil resource maps were digitized to generate seamless mosaic, standardized spatial and non-spatial data and develop SIS on 1:250,000 scale using various capabilities of Geographic Information System (GIS). The schema has been developed for input soil parameters to effectively store, update, manage and query the soil resource database from seamless SIS. Attributions of various soil parameters were standardized in seamless soil polygon layer of India for entry of database on various soil themes. The standardized soil resource database contains information about the soil site characteristics, physical and chemical properties. The prototype standalone Geoportal has been designed and developed on local host to provide Web Map Services (WMS), Web Catalogue Services (WCS), interface tools and basic Geoportal functionalities. Further, Geoportal has been enriched with raster images of Shuttle Radar Topographic Mission (SRTM) Digital Elevation Model (DEM) (90 m), Advanced Space borne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) Global Digital Elevation Model (GDEM) (30 m) and Cartosat DEM (30 m), Indian Remote Sensing Satellite (IRS) P-6 LISS-III (23 m) and Advanced Wide Field Sensor (AWiFS) (56 m) and LANDSAT (30 m) data of India. The web map applications have been created using the ArcGIS Viewer and Flex plug-in by displaying the layers on the web map. Besides the existing soils, soil loss and climatic data, soil profile point database have also been developed. The developed WMS architecture allows the user to add new map service to the existing service, produce a map for area of interest and answer basic queries about the content of the map. The WCS provides the facility to retrieve data and find out the data relevant to the application needs. The developed SIS and Prototype Geoportal pave the way for development of next generation operational Geoportal to enforce data consistency, standards, sharable protocols and build cross-domain knowledge based applications for effective utilization and management of soil and allied resource databases to develop location specific agricultural land use planning in order to enhance the crop productivity in the country.