Improvement of a Geospatial Web-Network for Road Substructure Management in Mekelle City, Ethiopia

Abstract

Infrastructure is a framework which covers the basic facilities and capacities of material, institutional and personnel kind which are essential for the functioning of a national economy. Road is key infrastructure which leads to an overall better standard of living; it is currently the heart of regional connectivity of a continent. Road substructure management is a challenging task to many developing countries, due to limited technical resources. This is a challenging issue too in Ethiopia in general, and in Mekelle city in particular. In Mekelle road substructure is poorly managed, mainly caused by a lack of appropriate organization and access of spatial information timely, leading to poor and unhurried decision making processes. Due to the fast expansion and urbanization developments, the city urgently needs to upgrade its road management system, while optimizing its limited resources. This study was conducted first to assess the existing road substructure management in Mekelle city, and second to exploit the use of available low-cost geo-spatial Web technologies so as to improve it. Methods included the use of PostgreSQL to create a geospatial database that will store road substructure information and the use of the Open Geo-spatial Consortium (OGC) standard’s Web Map Service (WMS) for disseminating this information over the Internet, through an interactive geo-portal. A Geo-spatial Web prototype has been developed and tested; and its relevance was validated by users in Mekelle city. The study showed that with the use of Geo-spatial Web technologies, road substructure management can be improved significantly in places where resources are limited.

Keywords: Road Substructure Management, Geo-spatial Web-Network, Mekelle, Ethiopia