Design and development of a web GIS-based visualization and analytical platform for Farm-to-Market Road projects of the Philippines’ Department of Agriculture

Abstract

This paper presents the design and development of a web GIS-based visualization platform for Farm-to-market road (FMR) project implementations of the Department of Agriculture (DA) in the Philippines. In monitoring and implementing FMRs, issues like FMR project duplication, overlapping, and segmentation of road FMR constructions arise. IROAD or Integrated Road on Agricultural Development initially addresses these concerns. It is an online interactive MIS that aims to consolidate, store/manage, and analyze GIS-based data of DA and other National Government Agencies’ FMR projects. However, it is limited only to filtering and viewing Agricultural and Fisheries Infrastructure (AFI) projects according to specific criteria. Also, the process of map rendering and visualization is slow and laggy. These limitations mark developing a more sophisticated web GIS application that can facilitate the visualization and analysis of FMR implementations. The utilization of Free and Opensource Software (FOSS) like GeoDjango, GeoServer, PostgreSQL/PostGIS satisfies the storage and visualization requirements of the system. User experience was made easy in terms of data management and generation of reports with the help of readily available scripting and styling libraries like Leaflet, JavaScript, and Bootstrap. The application is advantageous not just for the community of FMR beneficiaries but also to the stakeholders and various implementing agencies, as this builds an FMR information system among themselves.