Interactive Digital Atlas of Watersheds Water Supply for Municipalities of Goiânia Metropolitan Region
ISBN 978-85-88783-11-9
Authors
1Araújo, M.; 2Ribeiro, N.; 3Ferreira, N.
1FEDERAL UNIVERSITY OF GOIÁS Email: maxwell.antonio7@gmail.com
2FEDERAL UNIVERSITY OF GOIÁS Email: noely.ribeiro@uol.com.br
3FEDERAL UNIVERSITY OF GOIÁS Email: nclferreira@gmail.com
Abstract
Since 2001, the International Cartographic Association (ICA) has been dealing with the development of research on the development of atlases, introducing new concepts such as cartographic visualization and interactivity. Therefore, the atlases that were previously simply a book containing cartographic documents and other elements in a static format, will offer to the user, more possibilities, in an digital interactive environment. Facing a expressive geographical database about the Metropolitan Region of Goiânia, emerged the need to prepare a Digital Cartographic Atlas of watersheds to water that region, applying some of the concepts of digital mapping that has been developed and used in recent years by the cartographic community. Taking the purpose of researching feasible alternatives for the availability of digital thematic cartographic maps and others geographic information of watesheds for water supply of the metropolitan region, constructin an interactive Digital Atlas. The study area involves two planning units: the watershed, as an integrative unity between nature and actions of the local society; and the Metropolitan Region, defined as a strongly urbanized area, where the large joints of two or more cities, creating a continuous urban area caused by territorial expansion bordering counties, mainly due to the interaction of economic and social communication between these cities. Nowadays the Goiânia Metropolitan Region is comprised of 20 counties, totaling an area of 7312.84 km2 in the Goiás state, with 19 watersheds for public water supply of the municipalities. The research was conducted in three phases, initially with the pursuit for literary material about current methodologies of digital cartographic visualization, in the second phase occurred the testing of computational open source platforms available on the internet for digital atlas construction, and finally, the third phase involved the organization of dataset and preparation of cartographic documents and the construction of the atlas with a digital interactive enviroment. The platform used was the QGISCloud, available online (https://qgiscloud.com/), which can be used in connection with the software QuantumGIS (http://qgis.org/). We chose this platform because it is open source software, and it is practical in the insertion and handling of geographic dataset. The QGISCloud platform enables the visualization of digital map and provides tools interactive viewing (zoom and pan), change the hierarquical order of layers, has tools for measuring areas and distances, and geographic attribute and metadata query, and print maps organized by the user. The insertion of thematic maps is easy due to the fact that it is a plugin of a Geographic Information System software QuantumGIS. The geographic database inserted in the platform comprises: the geographical boundary of Goiânia metropolitan region, the boundaries of the municipalities, the boundaries of the 19 watersheds for public water supply , the locations of waste disposal, and the land use map. In the Atlas constructed, the user can observe thematics maps, in vectorial structure, superimposed on the high resolution images provided by Google Earth platform. The platform selection was considered the most critical in the development of research, it was necessary to conduct several pursuits and testes of platforms available. The Interactive Digital Atlas of watersheds for water supply of municipalities in the Metropolitan Region of Goiânia is a very useful and actual tool, due to the consideration of the most contemporary concepts in computing and mapmaking terms. The product complements the publication and dissemination of the results obtained in the research about Geographic Information System for Watershed of Public Water Supply in the municipalities of the Goiás State. The constructed atlas can be accessed through the address http://qgiscloud.com/macrozee_go/bacias.
Keywords
Web cartography; Water supply; Atlas