Griffins Proposal
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The Health Promotion Board (HPB) was established as a statutory board under the Ministry of Health in 2001 with a vision to build a nation of healthy people. HPB organises many Health Promotion programmes and requires many tools to assist them in planning to ensure efficient outreach and maximize public resources.
The need for this GIS application came about as the current work processes at HPB is very time-consuming and they would like a custom-made application to assist in their planning. It is difficult for new colleagues to learn quickly as some technical knowledge is required, and hence very reliant on staff who are strong in using QGIS. It is a very manually intensive process now, as they are required to do analysis by selecting suitable areas for their outreach programmes and calculating their KPI on excel spreadsheets.
Our objective is to build an interactive and visual web application that utilises GIS functions for geospatial planning and analysis. It will be able to compute and analyse HPB KPI reporting metrics. The web application should be easy to use to support the staff both technical and non-technical in their many Health Promotion programme and outreach planning. It will also assist the staff in clear and easy to understand presentations to the executives who have little or no background in GIS analysis so as to be able to plan their operations.
Our scope of work includes building a web application that would run on a SVY21 projection. One of the key visualisation feature is allowing users to toggle, view and overlay map layers, on top of base layers from Open Street Map. Attributes of each location can be displayed on mouseover and users may customise the colours used to represent pointers on different map layers. The function to upload a .shp, .csv, or text file would be included, to allow users to plot their own map layers. Users will also be able to edit the map layers and download the changes in .shp, .csv or text file format.
To allow users to calculate the KPI, a form would be required to allow users to input the buffer radius and type of services to search for, within the radius. The application will also generate charts and graphs to visualise the KPI and related data.
The following datasets would be required for this project
- Living dwellings,
- Healthier dining options(Restaurants, Fast Food, Food Court, Coffee shop)
- Parks
- Community centres
- Residential Committee
- Smoking Cessation Touchpoints
- GRC zones
The above datasets would all be represented in point form, with the exception of the GRC zones.
Datasets in the form of .csv, with only postal codes would have to be geocoded. This can be done via Google Geocoding API, but google has imposed a limit of 2,500 requests a day (Google, n.d.). Alternatively, we can use other geocoding api available online but using a government sourced API would be most ideal for the geocoding of postal codes.
Datasets in the form of KML would have to be converted to .shp or geoJSON and JSON formats. Shapefiles would allow us to explore the data on QGIS while geoJSON and JSON formats allow integration with javascript libraries like d3.js.
Before building the web application, we have to first process the data obtained. Data in .csv form with no coordinates given will have to be geocode prior. After which, it will be processed on R if necessary. Data will then be stored in PostgreSQL and managed using PgAdmin.
Map layers in .kml or .shp formats will be plotted on QGIS. Within QGIS, a plugin, QGIS2Leaflet, would then be used to generate a basic template of the web application.
The web application would then be linked to PostgreSQL for the necessary data to be processed and loaded only when requested. On the frontend, input field will be created to take in input for spatial queries. Spatial queries, such as searching for locational points within a buffer area of a selected location can be done with a PostGIS extension on PostgreSQL.
Data that does not require processing and is lightweight enough, can be saved in GeoJSON and JSON format to be read and displayed directly on the web application.
After which, on the d3.js would be used to plot charts and graphs linked to interaction on the map layers.
A lightweight, portable web application that can be easily brought over to different machines without installation. The interactive web application should show the Singapore map with many attributes for filtering to assist in HPB’s daily planning needs. The user would be able to use the web application for presentations and also export the generated results into various file formats.
We will have to find a method for getting coordinates from postal codes. Also we need to make the application portable as there is a need to run SQL queries and the database cannot be hosted online due to the confidentiality of data.
