Abstract:
Crop data is very useful in terms of agriculture sector. Combination of spatial and
aspatial crop data make greater awareness and more accurate knowledge in
agriculture industry. New technology can be used to collect, display and analysis
the crop data in decision making process. Web GIS which is a type of distributed
information systems, comprising at least a server and a client, is one of the
technologies that can be used to display and analyze spatial and aspatial data on
the Internet. Objective of this study is to use of capability of GIS and Web GIS to
collect, manipulate and display the paddy data and in each district of Sri Lanka
for Yala and Maha seasons from 2005 to 2019. Paddy production statistics from
agriculture & statistic environmental division, Department of Census & Statistics
and districts data layers from Survey Department were collected as secondary
data. District wise total production of paddy collected data were entered to excel
sheet with compatible format to Web GIS. After that, entered excel sheet was
joined to attribute table of district shape file through ArcGIS 10.1 software.
Likewise, two shape files with attribute tables were prepared to show Yala and
Maha total production of paddy. After that, shape files with the attribute table
were included to Web GIS and prepared it in user friendly way. Results on
district-wise paddy production from 2005 to 2019 with the datasets in Sri Lanka
indicate the system can effectively manage regional agriculture spatial
information and show a good applicability & guidance on agriculture
management. This study reveals that GIS and Web GIS support a large number of
users simultaneously; it makes better cross-platform capability; it is easy to use
for end users; it gives opportunity for map handling, agricultural spatial
information query and analysis; it is a collaborative collection of geospatial
information; it can be used for cropping system evaluation, ecological
distribution of farm products, estimation of cropping potential production, visual
display of results and system maintenance. However, when considering the data
and information displaying and sharing, Web GIS is user friendly than ArcGIS.
