AfriGIS has designed and developed a totally integrated solution, utilising handheld PC/GPS and GIS software technologies. HP's Jornada 420 (its answer to the Palmpilot), running Windows CE.

A paradigm shift was long due to simplify and enhance traditional processes of data capturing. The Cape Metropolitan Council (CMC) initiated this shift by investigating the possibility to utilise new technology to conduct bus passenger boarding and alighting surveys on 7749 trips and 519 bus routes within the Cape Metropolitan Area (CMA). AfriGIS provided the CMC with a total solution to yield the following advantages:

* Less/no time required to predefine and generate field survey sheets.

* Less time required to process the data.

* More accurate data.

* Easy representation of the data.

* All data in a standard format.

* Easy GIS data integration.

A generic application was developed for the Jornada 420 on the Windows CE platform to yield an effective, yet user-friendly tool, for bus data capturing. Information such as arrival time, departure time, location (co-ordinates) of bus stops, passengers boarding and alighting, payment method etc can be captured with the application. The system's open architecture, along with a modular development approach will ensure easy future enhancement.

A proprietary table structure had to be developed to ensure compact storage of captured data and minimise storage capacity utilisation on the Jornada 420. The layout of the table was designed to enable structured post capturing analysis of data, ie provide exact details on all the relevant attributes associated with each captured record.

The application further required linking the GPS to the Jornada 420 and populating the database with the co-ordinates from the GPS. The system was thoroughly tested and yielded accuracy of between four and 50 m from the exact locations.

The data stored on the Jornada 420 had to be extracted and imported into TransCAD Transportation GIS software. AfriGIS developed an easy-to-use application to conduct this importing procedure. The application imported the proprietary text file formats directly in the TransCAD GIS system, plotted all the bus stop locations (as standard geographic files) and attached all alphanumeric data captured in the field survey to the location. The importing of the Jornada 420 data into TransCAD GIS was a simple, once-off exercise, without the need of user intervention.

AfriGIS

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