MMAA Delegation Reviews Roads Applications   lnoor Ladak, GIS Coordinator for the Civil Engineering Department's Roads Division of Qatar's Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Agriculture (MMAA), made a presentation to H.E. Sheikh Ahmed Bin Hamad Al-Thani, Minister of MMAA and accompanying officials in March. Ladak conducted an executive briefing to update the ministerial officials on the status of the GIS work done with respect to the country's road network. Among featured presentations was the Traffic Section Information Management System (TRAMS) application, designed to provide quick and easy access to a variety of traffic-related information. TRAMS, based on ArcView Version 2, provides a set of tools for engineers, technicians, and management to readily access pertinent data for various purposes, such as decision support, inventory control, maintenance data, engineering drawing analysis, interagency infrastructure locations, map production, and so forth. The user interface was a key element in the development of TRAMS. Comments Ladak, "We decided early in the planning stages that unless the product was straight forward in use, we would miss our target audience, so ease-of-use was a primary consideration." With this in mind, the product was developed with a customized user interface including tool bars, extended on-line help modules, guided views of data, and subject-based individual application modules that allow users to focus on individual tasks. The scope of data included in this first version of TRAMS includes locational and conditional data for traffic junction equipment and traffic signs, parts inventories, junction maintenance, as-built junction drawings, junction video and ortho image views, project information data, local area plans, and inter-agency spatial data such as the urban polygon layer and the Roads Flowline Network. Also demonstrated was a unique, automated method for determining road centerlines by using the existing roads polygon coverage. The location of the centerline, or flowline as it is known in Qatar, is fundamental to the development of any GIS system for roads and the subsequent planning and building of the roadway infrastructure. Often, it is necessary to survey the entire road network to determine the road flowline, which is both costly and time consuming. In this particular case, where the centerlines had to be created from scratch, it was necessary to come up with an unconventional solution that allowed a high-accuracy flowline network coverage to be created within a short time span, and with minimal resources. In response to this criteria, a process using Thiessen Polygons was developed using the CGIS's urban polygon layer. This process basically selects all the road-related polygons, converts the road-edges of these polygons to points, and generates Thiessen polygons from those points. Arcs forming the road centerlines are then extracted and post-processed to achieve the highly accurate road centerlines. This technique has already been used to process more than 800 urban layer mapsheets to automatically generate road flowlines. Concludes Ladak, "We are proud of these two applications, which are strategic to our work here and I am grateful that the Minister was able to view them firsthand."   CONTENTS NEXT