An Approach to Develop a Geographic Information Database Using Dot Spatial Open Source Platform and Google Search Engine

摘要

Currently, Internet has become a great database of knowledge and information for different disciplines. For instance, today, we can see the weather conditions for any place in any time online. All those data and information are important for geographic studies. However, transferring such information from Internet websites to GIS databases is a tides work. This paper presents an automatic approach to transfer Internet information to a GIS database using open source platform. The case study of Malaysia database is used to be updated with temperature data from Google engine by the developed application. The designed application is developed by DotSpatial platform and Visual Basic.Net programming environment. It consists of four modules: (a) connection to Google and search for temperature data. (b) The process module to process the inputs and calculate the HTML parameters. (c) Temperature data extraction module to find out the temperature data. (d) Shape file update module to append the temperature data into GIS database. The results of testing the developed application showed good results of updating the loaded shape file of Malaysia states with the temperature information.