Service Oriented Architecture Based SDI Model for Mineral Resources Management in India

Today's economic growth rate of any country hugely depends on development of the mining sector. Thus, the level of technology employed for meeting the extraction conditions must meet environmental norms. Exploration of mineral resources in India and mining is a ready application for technologies for ensuring productivity and efficiency. Mineral resources management uses Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) in the study reported. SDI is a portal where each stakeholder can access, use and exchange spatial and non-spatial data for social, economic and environmental activities. The proposed system at national level may have its nodes at state level and local level on Intranet and/or Internet on Global level. The present work reports the development of an efficient interoperable Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based SDI Model for mineral resources management in India (Acronym: MRII (Mineral Resources Information Infrastructure)) to provide better geospatial web services for different applications in terms of their functionality, ease of operation and performance as applied in various mineral resources management systems. The MRII is modular. It allows the publishing of web service descriptions as well as to submit requests to discover the web services of user's interests. The model supports integration of applications and uses thin-client architecture. Web Map Service (WMS), Web Features Service (WFS) and Web Catalogue Service (CS-W) of Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards have been used for sharing and exchange of geospatial data in MRII. The open source GIS software, used for development of MRII, include Quantum GIS for creation of mineral resources geospatial database, PostGIS for storing of spatial database, MYSQL for storing of security aspects of spatial and non-spatial data; ALOV, GeoServer, GeoNetwork, GeoWebCache and Apache Tomcat for imparting geospatial web capabilities and PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor), JSP (Java Server Pages) and GeoExt (Geo Extension) for dynamic server side scripting. The developed MRII presently provides detailed information about mineral resources in India as a test case and aims to deliver spatial information at affordable cost. The same may be used in future for other countries on expanding the volume of spatial data to include the Globe.