A WebGIS application for the management of the Ethiopian Road Network System

Abstract

A well maintained database system for the Ethiopian roads network would play a significant role in the road maintenance, traffic safety, mobility management, environmental and socioeconomic planning, etc. This paper addresses the design and development of software system called Ethiopian Roads Network Information System (ERNIS). ERNIS is a web application which incorporates geographical information (WebGIS) that is used for gathering, updating and working with the  national roads network data for Ethiopia. Using this system, road agencies and other stakeholders can add new road data in the system, update existing roads  information, and investigate the maintenance and other requirements of road networks, etc. by remotely accessing the central database through a web browser. Geographical Information System (GIS) data of the roads’ physical location, the towns each pass through, the rivers they cross, location of bridges on the road and other geographical features accompany each road segment data. The development of ERNIS followed the model-view-controller (MVC) framework and it was  implemented using open source components for the various parts of the system. The system has been configured at the School of Civil and Environmental  Engineering and in the Office of the Road Fund. It was tested and is found to be functional that requires populating it by appropriate data, which would be the next step.

Key words: Road Network, ERNIS, WebGIS, Open-Source, OpenLayers, Web Application, GeoServer