Design and Implementation of a Temporal Gis for Monitoring the Urban Land Use Change

Urban areas are the scene of considerable growth and transformation processes which result in the conversion of land from rural to urban use and in secondary transformations from one urban use to another. In the cities of developing the world such land use change processes can be both formal or informal and they are often also very rapid. Information systems, which can deal effectively with the spatial, temporal and contextual data pertaining to land use change are required. This paper is an attempt to provide a simple and easy to handle tool for urban planners to store and analyse spatio-temporal land use data more efficiently by implementing a Temporal GIS (TGIS). PC ArcInfo is one of the commonly used PC based GIS, which has been used to implement the space time composite model for TGIS, integrated with Object Oriented and Event and Evidence data type concepts. Database_time and World_time has been incorporated. System architecture, implementation, and user interface are discussed here; spatio-temporal data is covered by Raza and Kainz (1988). The user interface has been developed to create, edit and visualize spatio-temporal land use data. Distinction has been made between essential and non-essential changes in land use.