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4D GeoSpatial Urban Information System via
Object Relational Approach
Hooshang Eivazy Faculty member of Iran university of Science and Technology Tel (+98) 861-3675604 h_eivazy@yahoo.com Amir Reza Moradi Faculty member of Iran university of Science and Technology Tel (+98) 918-1622986 Abstract: Nowadays, despite the efforts in several important cities of Iran, none has been successful to run desirable Urban GIS to suit the city requirements. In the September 2006, GIS group of Arak municipality was reorganized based on strict incorporation of municipality and GIS department of Iran University of Science & Technology. To implement GIS, it was tried to combine latest advanced concepts of urban GIS in the world. Suitable policies in system development proved cost recovery aspects of system by beginning of Bench Marking, while it s efficient, affordable, and versatile operation, improved the social and technical ability of system. 1.0 Introduction Since 1960, Iranian cities engaged with sophisticated processed. Imbalanced social revolution caused city sprawling. During the next years it was propagated to all other cities. Nowadays, almost all cities suffer from a kind of irregularity in all aspects of urban affairs. It has had direct effects in the level of people welfare, security, economic, assurance, hygiene, education and culture. Regardless the substantial reasons, today municipalities are involved in some other kind of problems too. City sprawling led to creation of huge amount of spatial and non spatial data. This has expanded city bodies, while municipalities, administrative center of cities, as the brain of such bodies, have been operationally become disabled. In the other word, most of municipalities are not powerful enough even to monitor city status. As the brain is not able to manage, control and even monitor its body, its demolishing would be unassailable. Great number of unsuccessful projects was slowly convincing governments that GIS indeed is not a good issue to solve the urban problems and they should look for something else. An exact evaluation of such projects revealed that the most important reason of project defeating was related to system designers and implementers. Majority of those who were involved with designing and implementing had not an accurate intuition of GI Systems. Establishment of GIS Group in Arak Municipality In the September of 2006, GIS group of Arak municipality was optimized based on coherent incorporation of Geodesy & Geomatic Engineering Department of Iran University of Science and Technology. Therefore, relief of mayor, city consultants, provincial governments and even municipal employee stand point of view to GIS, was necessity to absorb their strong support. A short term plan was regulated to prove and exhibit wonderful power of real Urban GI Systems, in all aspects includes; technical, administrative, innovative and of course economical benefits of such systems. Due to loyal effort of group members, after six month, the first phase of project was successfully finished. The pilot project exhibited high efficiency in suiting sophisticated urban requirements that mainly sourced from its powerful data management system. Maybe the most important subject was the economical prosperity of project. In addition, presenting its services to other provincial governments, absorbed more supports and made the group, herald of GI System conductor in Markazi province. Multi-Disciplinary GI System as the result of Multi-Proficiency Expert Group Based on macro federal plans, Arak municipal GIS group, regulate flexible strategy to implement Urban GI System. Project life-cycle was designed using combination of various methods to acquire predefined goals. It was decided to choose the following scopes; implementing urban database as the infrastructure of urban geospatial database, depositing wonderful ability of GI Systems even in administrative divisions of municipality, presenting affordable, versatile and interesting services to public and state parts, providing municipality with financial benefits of GI Systems, increasing general knowledge of municipal clerks with GI System potentials and extending researches in division. Following picture illustrate the primary organization chart that was formed to grasp on stated goals.  Figure 1:organizational chart of Arak municipal GIS group includes five divisions and other subdivisions. Despite the little number of group members, because of vast extended tasks, each person was forced to handle several duties. Figure (01) Following the growth chart plan in the balanced manner, was the golden key and of course required a lot of efforts. Virtual Urban World Construction Urban environment is a complicated space that consists of thousand urban objects. Of course, objects may be defined using various points of views. In the other word, according to different profession, objects would be varied. According to a deep understanding of city objects, it would be simple to recognize the most powerful dependencies exist among urban organizations and city objects. Thought it would be easy to delegate and divide those features among organizations. In municipal urban modeling, just those objects have been taken that strictly are belonged to municipality. To solve the problem, a virtual interface is made to satisfy municipal objects connection requirements. Indeed these virtual interfaces are supposed as real objects. These objects provide specific view of municipality to certain objects which do not belong to municipality. Besides the major urban objects, there are some objects that would not be treated as real as others such as municipal and registered deeds. Those objects have critical role in completing objects conversation and can not be ignored at all. Other important issue in designing urban conceptual model was its gradual development. In the other word, model experience a gradual development as the rational thinking of modelers, are slowly growing up and recognizes its surrounded environment better.  Figure 2- Designed Urban Conceptual model (without links and behaviors) was result of gradual and continuous development. Continuous development was direct effect of designers recognition improving. Figure (01) Municipal Arak GI System Specifications According to implemented needs analysis, it was revealed that 2D GI Systems are not able to satisfy municipal requirements. There are so many skyscrapers in cities, all consists of several floors. Each floor would include different activities. For example floors number -1 and -2, are parking; Ground, 1, 2, 3 have commercial activities, 4,5 are administrative ones, while others are residential. There would be a beautiful restaurant at the highest floor of that building. In addition, each floor would consist of different units, with various activities. Nevertheless, non-spatial modeling is not the proper solution whereas unit locations in a floor, significantly affects the financial aspects. Consequently, solution was construction of real 3dimensional objects represent real units in space.  Figure 3- Virtual 3 dimensional objects along with all necessary properties. 3D buildings are made of their important basic objects. Figure (01) Several prevalent 3D models have been checked against urban requirements to examine which is the best. Wire frame and boundary representation models, were refused because they were not able to represent real volume. Indeed such models are suitable for civil engineers where they are not interested in space enclosed by the building elements. Cell decomposition model, has been designed for graphical missions and substantially is not able to support GIS analysts. Spatial occupancy models which use voxels as the basic elementary component of 3D space strongly are used in 3D spatial analysis. Therefore Solid Geometry models were chosen as the best solution to represent real 3D urban construction. The most important problem was significantly sourced by time. An urban Geospatial system without time, is in fact just a single snapshot of city. Obviously in city space, object property and behaviors, are continuously changed by time. Some remains unchanged others would change annually and the rest may change monthly or daily. Urban objects would change even so faster for example many times a day. This problem seriously threats accuracy of designed model without respecting to time. To come over stated problem, designing process of urban objects must be affected by time. There are some techniques to meddle the time in the modeling process. Of course any techniques have their own advantages and disadvantages in matching certain requirements. Consequently combination of techniques was deployed to cover all objects with variable properties and behaviors in modeling process. Model unassailably passes all temporal checks. Using temporal system, enable municipality to track any alteration in the field of, unit usage, land use, taxes, ownerships, municipal certifications, legal foals or misdeeds, .... based on the time. This means equipping municipality to a powerful memory to memorize historical changes in any possible urban aspects. Such temporal smart system revolutionizes municipalities in several urban fields and doesn t let any thing to be neglected any more. Obviously combination of 3D spatial systems with temporal ones, is only possible due to deploying object oriented concepts. Specification composes the basic structure of model while aggregation concludes some multi-part structure in the model. Interfaces have been widely uses to represent structures which do not normally belong to municipalities and encapsulation is the only solution to simplify model to its designers. Resulted model was the core to implement so many applications. According to such perfect model, majority of sophisticated applications were simply done due to writing simple queries. Direct and indirect Effects of GIS in Arak Municipality As GIS was fired in the context of Arak municipality, for the first time the staff understood "it is possible to have a dynamic sense of city". Terrific disable ancient archive started to be replaced with powerful digital database. Continuous innovation of urban applications is bringing employees and civilians, new services. GIS significantly is increasing the quality and rate of services while it is detracting the cost of previous services and indirectly makes the civilians satisfied. Because of the critical status of land price and ownership, the urban GIS was proposed to federal governments as the best platform to improve cadastre system (has not been approved yet). Now it is providing vast range of accurate and rapid statistics for urban planners, designers and managers. By accomplishment of the system, it was known as the best platform to start administrative automation system and replacing the human contemplation with artificial agents.  Figure 4- Arak GIS Group of municipality Figure (01) Conclusion & Recommendations Using the experiences of member, it was revealed that, advised modeling process for Geospatial database system, as the core of urban GI System, is an actually important stage. It significantly affects all other GI Sub-systems. During the modeling process, need to prepared library of advanced Geospatial modeling techniques was obviously revealed for designers and modelers. In addition, efficient modeling approach, presented real tremendous dominant domain of GI Systems in other municipal zones such as administrative and fiscal zones. Nevertheless, nothing would happen without efficient, dominant and continuous government support. Of course in order to absorb interior and exterior supports, nice presentation and economical revenues of GI Systems are the most important parameters. To follow the long-term GI System goals, it would be unassailable to establish independent organizational structure. Independent structure along with strong support let GI System grows in the urban construction and extending its interesting services to other urban aspects. Acknowledgment The author would like to thank the following members whose comments and assistance were instrumental in the development of the essay: And special thanks to Arak GIS group of Municipality: Gholamali Alahdadi, Matin Shahri, Ahmad Lotfi, Ghorbani 6. References
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