GGIT 531 Project Design in GIS
2006-2007 Spring
Web Based GIS for METU Campus
Gökçe Türkmendağ
(GGIT, MS, 2nd Sem.)
Abstract
Middle East Technical University campus has a very large area. In such an extensive place,
reaching the necessary information which affects campus life, such as the locations of the
buildings, classrooms, rooms of the academic staff, computer labs, bus stops and medical
center may be very difficult for anyone who does not know the campus well, for instance a
freshman who has just been admitted to the METU, and even for a personnel or a graduate
who has spent a long time in the campus. In order to reduce this difficulty, an interactive
campus map which can be queried on the Internet can display that kind of information with its
geographical locations. Geographical Information System (GIS) , which has been widely used
on the Internet recently, can be a solution. For this study, an interactive campus map including
some main layers with their attribute tables is prepared and published on the Internet with
ArcIMS map server, and viewed on the client’s browser with Macromedia Flash Map Viewer.
The users can make queries, browse the layers, see detailed informations, zoom in, zoom out,
and pan the map.
Keywords : Macromedia Flash; ActionScript; ArcXML; ArcIMS; Internet; Web based; GIS;
Map Server; METU; Mapping
1
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................ 2
2. STUDY AREA ...................................................................................................................... 3
3. COLLECTED DATA .......................................................................................................... 4
4. ANALYSIS ............................................................................................................................ 6
4.1. Method and softwares ................................................................................................... 6
4.2. Thematic maps............................................................................................................... 7
5. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS ...................................................................................... 7
6. DISCUSSION ....................................................................................................................... 9
7. REFERENCES ..................................................................................................................... 9
8. BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................ 9
9. APPENDIX ......................................................................................................................... 11
1. Thematic map of building types ....................................................................................... 11
2. Thematic map of undergraduate student population ........................................................ 12
3. Thematic map of female students ratio (%) ..................................................................... 13
4. Thematic map of undergraduate foreign student population ........................................... 14
5. Thematic map of foreign students ratio (%) ..................................................................... 15
1. INTRODUCTION
Middle East Technical University campus has a very large population of academic and
administrative staff, and students. For instance, every year approximately 24000 students are
registered to METU, 9600 of which are freshmen. The campus also has a vast area of 4500
hectares excluding the forest area of 3043 hectares. In such an extensive area, it may be very
difficult to reach necessary information, which affects campus life, especially for the
freshmen.
First question coming to mind that a student wants to know can be “How can I go from this
point to that point ?”. To answer that question, the student can use the campus map on METU
web page, but this map can only show the roads and places of the buildings, and if you do not
know the campus well, it may be still difficult to find your way as long as it does not have a
search interface, since you may not know where to look at. And finding your way is not the
only information that the student wants to know. He/she may also wants to know the places of
the classrooms, bus stops, computer labs, eating places, and so on…
The aim of this project is to create an interactive map accessible on the Internet, which
displays the places of basic “where“ questions asked by the students. The students can reach
the answers by making queries with a search interface and browsing the map with choosing
only the layers they are interested in.
In addition, we can also see from the map whether the campus supplies the students’ needs.
Knowing that the student population of each building, we can make analysis about the
capacities of certain services and facilities.
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2. STUDY AREA
In this project Middle East Technical University is studied, which is located on Eskişehir
Road, in the west of Ankara, 7 km from the city center, and has a campus area of 4500
hectares and forest area of 3043 hectares. Main campus area is located on the northern part of
the university land, and forest area is on the southern part of the land which extends near to
Gölbaşı Village.
Most of the academic buildings are located in the center of the campus, drawing an ellipse.
They are near the sporting areas, shopping centers, health center, banks and post office, which
are on the eastern part. The new buildings have been built on the western part, going far away
from the center.
There are 343 buildings in the campus having different categories, listed on Table 1.
Table 1 – Categories of campus buildings
Type
Academic
Administrative
Commercial
Cultural
Dormitory
Education
Health
Residential
Social
Sports
Technical
Other
Number of Buildings
72
8
30
5
22
6
2
65
21
27
66
19
Every year approximately 9000 students are newly registered to Middle East Techical
University. The campus has a student population of over 20000 every semester. In Table 2
number of registered students are listed for last six semesters :
Table 2 – Number of registrated students per semester
Semester :
Number of students :
2004-1 2004-2 2005-1 2005-2 2006-1 2006-2
24398 22022 25444 22971 25579 23177
3
3. COLLECTED DATA
The satellite imagery and all spatial data have the same projection system of :
•
•
•
•
Gauss Kruger (Transverse Mercator) Projection
Central Meridian : 33
based on the European Datum 1950
using International Spheroid 1924
and obtained from the master thesis data of Güllüoğlu (2006). In Table 3, the data sources
which he had used are listed.
Table 3 – Data Sources of Güllüoğlu
DATA
Buildings and roads layers from the
infrastructure information system of
Ankara (AYBIS), and data are
processed and updated to 2004
1/1.000 scaled plans of the
buildings under construction
1/5.000 scaled master
development plan of METU
METU Campus and Technopolis Urban
Design Project
SOURCE
Water and Sewerage Administration
(ASKI) of Ankara Metropolitan
Municipality (ABB)
YEAR
1998
Directorate of Construction and
Technical Works of METU
Metropolitan Municipality of Ankara
(ABB, 1994)
Urban Design Studio (UDS) of City
and Regional Planning Department of
METU
2004
1994
1997
Data Layers :
1) Buildings : Building layer attributes are building ID, building name, usage, names of
the classrooms, population of female, male and foreign undergraduate students
(Table 5). Building ID is a unique number which is included in most of the layers in
order to join tables.
2) Roads : Only the images of roads are used for this project.
3) Gates : These are the gates of METU campus, some of which are in construction or
not used yet.
4) Transportation : This layer includes information about the transportation points, such
as minibus stops, bus stops, ring stops and taxi lots.
5) Food : This layer has information about eating places and contains building ID, name
and phone number.
6) Computer labs : The layer is about METU Computer Center’s computer laboratories
and has information about building ID’s of the buildings in which they exist.
7) Disabled : There are some facilities which disabled people can make use of. These are
ramps, parking spaces, lavatories and elevators.
8) Wireless : This layer contains wireless network points within the campus.
9) Sports : The layer gives ability to acces sporting areas directly and has the same
attributes as buildings
Data sources are listed in Table 4.
4
Table 4 – Data sources of the layers
LAYER
Buildings
Roads, Stops
Gates
Food
Computer labs, wireless
Disabled
SOURCE
Güllüoğlu’s thesis, METU Computer Center
Güllüoğlu’s thesis
Güllüoğlu’s thesis, METU Phonebook
METU web page
METU Computer Center
METU Disability Support Coordination Unit web page
Table 5-Population distribution of undergraduate students registered at 2006-2007 spring term,
grouped by faculties, in descending order
Pop. of
DEPARTMENT
Female Std.
Faculty of Engineering
Electrical and Electronic Engineering
192
Mechanical Engineering
153
Civil Engineering
173
Computer Engineering
173
Industrial Engineering
237
Chemical Engineering
331
Metallurgical and Materials Engineering
118
Aerospace Engineering
91
Food Engineering
257
Geological Engineering
173
Environmental Engineering
175
Mining Engineering
79
Petroleum & Natural Gas Engineering
55
Faculty of Arts and Sciences
Physics
181
Chemistry
284
Mathematics
234
Sociology
314
Psychology
298
Molecular Biology and Genetics
245
Philosophy
148
Statistics
130
History
89
Faculty of Architecture
Architecture
328
City and Regional Planning
208
Industrial Design
152
Faculty of Economic and Administrative Sciences
Economics
350
Business Administration
272
Political Science and Public Administration
335
International Relations
323
Faculty of Education
Elementary Education
322
Computer Educ. and Instructional Techn.
113
Secondary Science and Mathematics Educ.
111
Educational Sciences
114
Physical Education and Sports
15
Pop. of
Male Std.
Pop. of Female
Foreign Std.
Pop. of Male
Foreign Std.
Total Pop.
1519
1263
1213
751
466
315
414
357
163
229
198
266
264
0
3
8
5
3
7
10
7
11
6
6
3
6
49
40
45
42
27
30
29
36
22
23
24
24
69
1711
1416
1386
924
703
646
532
448
420
402
373
345
319
416
214
236
148
45
96
144
117
109
5
9
6
24
19
28
9
7
5
29
24
19
16
1
14
7
7
7
597
498
470
462
343
341
292
247
198
177
142
100
22
12
14
28
23
12
505
350
252
367
378
296
245
8
9
13
32
19
26
27
48
717
650
631
568
196
266
61
22
32
8
5
1
2
0
20
26
1
2
0
518
379
172
136
47
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4. ANALYSIS
4.1. Method and softwares
The layers are edited by ArcMap, and the map is published on the Internet with ArcIMS 9.1.
Apache web server with TomCat is installed on a Microsoft Windows XP machine.
ArcIMS map server has a client-server architecture (Aydınoğlu et al.). First, a response is sent
to the web server from the client machine by a map viewer. A map viewer is a web browser,
which can be either an HTML viewer, a JAVA viewer or a Flash viewer. Then the web server
makes a communication with the map server. Map server sends a request to the image server,
and image server prepares the map in image format like ‘JPG’, and sends it back to the map
server. Finally, map server sends the image to the web server, and web server passes it to the
client machine (Figure 1). All the communications among these requests and responses are
handled with ArcXML. ArcXML is the specified XML standard which is used as a connector
within these communications.
In this project, Macromedia Flash player is used as the map viewer. Map viewer components
must be added as an extension to Macromedia Flash program in order to make access towards
map servers. There are two components that Macromedia Flash use, mapviewer and
connector. The mapviewer component deals with the visualizing and human interaction,
where the connector deals with the communication between the map server and Macromedia
Flash. These connectors translate methods into ArcXML, then send this ArcXML to the map
server over the Internet and translate the result from the map server back into events.
The web page was prepared with Adobe Photoshop and Macromedia Homesite softwares.
Forms, data queries, zoom, pan and select functions were created by Macromedia Flash’s
scripting language, “ActionScript”.
Using Macromedia Flash as a map viewer gives flexibility for preparing the web interface. It
is faster than a Java Applet, and can be viewed from any browser embedding Flash player. If
the Flash player is not found, it can be downloaded automatically with user prompt in a few
seconds.
Figure 1 – Client-server architecture
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Characteristics of the server used :






Intel Pentium 4 2.80 GHz
2.5 GB of RAM
Microsoft Windows XP Professional
Apache HTTP Server 2.0.48
Apache Tomcat 5.0
ArcIMS 9.1
4.2. Thematic maps
Some thematic maps are created for the project. For the population maps, only the academic
buildings near the center of the campus and the undergraduate students registered at
2006-2007 spring term were studied. Those maps are :





Population of undergraduate students in department buildings,
Ratio of undergraduate female students in department buildings,
Population of undergraduate foreign students in department buildings,
Ratio of undergraduate foreign students in department buildings,
Buildings according to their usages.
It is difficult to organize building data of METU, because one building can have more than
one department, and one department can have more than one building. When showing the
population, the building which has the head of the department was chosen for departments
having more than one building, and population of departments sharing one building were
added.
Population distribution of female, male, foreign female, foreign male, total foreign and total
undergraduate students are listed in Table 5.
Classifications are made with equal interval method when creating the thematic maps.
Thematic maps can be seen in the Appendix.
5. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS
There are some methods for publishing map on the Internet. In this study ArcIMS map server
was used for this purpose, because data layers were created by ArcGIS.
When presenting a project on the Internet, its appearance and usability is very important.
After forming the layers and ArcXML files, a map viewer software was chosen among JAVA
viewer, HTML viewer and Macromedia Flash viewer. Macromedia Flash viewer has a very
strong ability for designing the user interface, and coding capabilities by ActionScript. It is
faster than Java, and platform independent. Nice animations resembling Google Earth can be
added to the map, and queries can be made with ActionScript.
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In this project, buildings can be searched according to their names, and classrooms can be
searched according to their codes. Search results are listed in a listbox, and when rolling over
a result, the place of the item can be seen on the map with an animation. And when we click
on the result, the map zooms into the item we have chosen.
There is also an info button, a pan button, zoom buttons, and a full extent button. The info
button gives information about a building which is clicked on the map. Building’s name,
facilities for disabled people (ramps, parking places, wc, elevators etc.), undergraduate
student population (total, female and foreign population separately), classrooms and usage of
the building are listed.
A screenshot of the web site can be seen in Figure 2.
The web site can be accessed from this address :
http://gokceada.cc.metu.edu.tr/proje.html
Figure 2 - Screenshot of the web site of the project
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6. DISCUSSION
In this course, I learned how to implement a project from the beginning to the end step by
step. The project that I had chosen was directly relevant to my thesis subject. Also, a little part
of my thesis was completed, and I had an opportinity to choose the methods which I will use
during the preparation of my thesis.
I learned building a map server, using ESRI products and publishing a map on the Internet.
While studying ESRI products, I also made a research about other alternatives, like GML and
SVG, and had ability to compare them. In order to publish my map on the Internet, I used
some programming and scripting languages, which improved my coding capability as well.
Literatural search was one of the hardest steps for me, because I had difficulty to choose my
method. There were a lot of sources, including papers and tutorials about preparing a web
based GIS by using ESRI products, but most of them were non-academic. It took a lot of time
to read so many papers and decide which one to choose. But after that research, I realized that
I had gained so much knowledge that I had expected.
I also learned some presentation techniques which will be very useful for not only my
education, but also for my business life. Through our instructor’s warnings and advices, I
became aware of many mistakes that my friends and I did during presentations.
During the semester, we had a very good communication with the other students and our
instructor. We discussed our projects during the class, and after the class we often met and
supported each other until the end of the term. We shared our knowledge and softwares with
each other without complaining.
We had a visit to General Command of Mapping, which was a very interesting experience. It
was a good opportinity to visit there which may be difficult to have again in the future.
In conclusion, I think Project Design in GIS is one of the most important courses given by
METU Geodetic and Geographic Information Technologies Division. Actually, each student
who wants to study GIS must take this course, because it increases the capability of
researching, presentation, discussing, and draws a way for preparing a thesis.
7. REFERENCES
Aydınoğlu A. Ç., Yomralıoğlu T., September 23-26, 2002: "Web Based Campus Information
System", International Symposium on GIS, İstanbul.
Güllüoğlu N. C., 2005: “Evaulating Public Transportation Alternatives in the METU Campus
With the Aid of GIS”, MSc. Thesis, Middle East Technical University, Ankara.
8. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aydın, Y. E., 2006: "Web Based Multi Participant Spatial Data Entry in Crime Mapping”,
MSc. Thesis, Middle East Technical University, Ankara.
9
Baru C., Behere A., Cowart C., 2002: "Representation and Display of Geospatial Information:
A Comparison of ArcXML and SVG", IEEE.
Chang Y.,Park H., April 2006: "XML Web Service-based development model for Internet
GIS applications", International Journal of Geographical Information Science
Vol. 20, No. 4, 371–399.
Cheng K. P., 1998: “The Design of A Web-based Geographic Information System for
Community Participation”, MSc. Thesis, Department of Geography, University of Buffalo.
East R., Goyal R., Haddad A., Konovalov A., Rosso A., Tait M., Theodore J., 2001: "The
Architecture of ArcIMS, a Distributed Internet Map Server", C.S. Jensen, LNCS 2121, 387403.
Peng Z., Zhang C., 2004: "The roles of geography markup language (GML), scalable vector
graphics (SVG), and Web feature service (WFS) specifications in the development of Internet
geographic information systems (GIS)", J Geograph Syst 6, 95–116.
Usul N., Doğanoğlu V., 2000: "Middle East Technical University Campus and Land in GIS",
Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual ESRI User Conference.
Wangmutitakul P., Minoura T., Maki A., 2004: "WebGD: A Framework for Web-Based
GIS/Database Applications", Journal of Object Technology, vol. 3, no. 4, pp. 209-225.
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9. APPENDIX
1. Thematic map of building types
 There are 11 types of 343 buildings in the campus, and numbers of buildings for each
type are listed in Table 1.
11
2. Thematic map of undergraduate student population




Undergraduate students registered at 2006-2007 spring term were studied.
Undergraduate student populations of each department are listed in Table 5.
All the faculty buildings except Faculty of Education are included.
For the departments which have several buildings, only the buildings having the head
of the department are shown.
 For the departments sharing one building, total population is calculated by adding
student populations of each department.
 Classifications are made with equal interval method.
12
3. Thematic map of female students ratio (%)
 This thematic map shows the percentage of female undergraduate students of each
department at 2006-2007 spring term.
 Female and total undergraduate student populations of each department are listed in
Table 5.
 All the faculty buildings except Faculty of Education are included.
 For the departments which have several buildings, only the buildings having the head
of the department are shown.
 For the departments sharing one building, total population is calculated by adding
student populations of each department.
 Classifications are made with equal interval method.
13
4. Thematic map of undergraduate foreign student population
 Undergraduate foreign students registered at 2006-2007 spring term were studied.
 Undergraduate foreign student populations of each department are listed in Table 5,
classified by sex.
 All the faculty buildings except Faculty of Education are included.
 For the departments which have several buildings, only the buildings having the head
of the department are shown.
 For the departments sharing one building, total population is calculated by adding
student populations of each department.
 Classifications are made with equal interval method.
14
5. Thematic map of foreign students ratio (%)
 This thematic map shows the percentage of foreign undergraduate students of each
department at 2006-2007 spring term.
 Female and male foreign student populations of each department are listed in
Table 5.
 All the faculty buildings except Faculty of Education are included.
 For the departments which have several buildings, only the buildings having the head
of the department are shown.
 For the departments sharing one building, total population is calculated by adding
student populations of each department.
 Classifications are made with equal interval method.
15