Collaborative Web-GIS Design: a Case Study for Road Risk Analysis and Monitoring

This article presents a methodology for designing a webgis framework intended for automatically analyzing spatial data and updating statistics of interest with new information inserted daily by multiple users via a web portal. A practical example is used on vehicle incident data for assess risk in specific road segments. The two main segments integrated together will be described: the collaborative segment and the automatic analysis segment. The former gives end-users computer-aided tools to insert, modify and manage data related to incidents and vehicles monitoring, whereas the latter is developed to automatically analyze the incident data coming from the user’s input. As different public bodies survey accident data a collaborative environment is necessary and a webbased solution is ideal for permitting multi-user access and data insertion. A centralized approach as means to process the data as it is updated by multi-user input is described in all its parts. Serverside Structured Query Language functions optimize performance by using dedicated libraries for spatial processing and re-structuring the attributes associated to elements which are consequently reclassified for correct color-scaling. The end-product is a system that provides a seamless integration of front-end tools and back-end tools to update statistics in real time and provide them to stakeholders.