Urban metabolic mapping on the web: An example from Bangalore, India

Cities are like living entities, needing a continuous throughput of resources and energy for survival and growth, creating waste in the process. This paper documents the Bangalore Urban Mapping Project: an initiative to use this metabolic concept to inform comprehensive planning in the rapidly growing software capital of Bangalore city in India. Focusing on demographic growth, and water supply and consumption in its first phase, a web-based geo-portal has been developed for information delivery. The application, titled Bangalore Urban Mapping Project (BUMP) is built on a free and open source web GIS stack consisting of a Postgis database, PHP, OpenLayers, and Apache Web Server deployed on a 64-bit Ubuntu Linux server platform. The application logic is written in PHP to connect the many components of the interactive application. The application is made available on the BUMP website (http://www.seimapping.org/bump/). The application relies on AJAX to fetch layer data from the server and render the layer using OpenLayers on the fly. This allows users to view multiple layers at the same time without refreshing the page. Data is packed in GeoJSON format and is compressed to reduce traffic. Beyond thematic representation of each of twenty different map layers, graphical and tabular summaries of demographic and water data are presented dynamically using Javascript libraries including the Google Chart API. The application also uses other common Javascript libraries/plug-ins, like jQuery, jQuery UI, qTip, to ease the development and to ensure cross-browser compatibility.N/A30 mi