Optimus Template

BCS has written an extensive GIS-like software system to support the management of the INDEA. This INDEA Data Manager (IDM) provides an environment for maintaining and updating the INDEA coverages (i.e, the ED/VA boundary sets and other administrative regions). It contains customized features for handling the components of these coverages while maintaining the geometric integrity of the coverages as a whole.

The IDM also furnishes an environment for maintaining all INDEA data other than that stored in the coverages. This includes roads, hydrography, parks, schools, railways, address points and buildings. In addition, a separate batch application has been developed for reconciliation (or renoding). This process modifies the noding of the standard roads layer and the coverages following changes in these layers (e.g., adding a road that crosses a VA boundary), thus maintaining the INDEA data integrity following any changes.

The IDM is presented in the form of a GUI, in which different types of data are represented by means of layers (a layer represents the data from a single ESRI shapefile or a single view of the database). In the GUI, menus and toolbars are used to extract, manipulate and update data in the INDEA database, and to open, load, modify, and update data in shapefiles. These geometric shapes are displayed in a main graphics window, or canvas.

The GUI has the following functional components:

• a menu bar, which provides entries to a variety of general tasks
• a main toolbar, which provides buttons that correspond to the items in the File item of the menu bar, as well as certain other functions
• a zoom toolbar, which provides buttons for various zooming options
• an edit toolbar, which contains buttons that select various display, point-oriented and polygon-oriented tools
• a status bar, which displays information about the state of the application, and
• a pop-up context menu, which is displayed following a right click on the main canvas, and which provides context-sensitive functions