The Macaulay Institute

Land Allocation Decision Support System

Geographical Information System

The GIS provides facilities for spatial data storage, analysis and visualisation and is implemented in GE Smallworld, an object-oriented GIS.

Two object classes make up the core of the LADSS spatial data structure. These are the land block polygon (LBP) and the land block fragment polygon (LBFP).

LBP-LBFP Overlap

LBPs are the spatial representation of Land Block and define the boundary of areas of homogeneous land use management (e.g. a field or compartment). LBFPs spatially represent Land Block Fragments. The diagram shows the LBPs (field boundaries) overlayed with LBFPs (areas of homogeneous soil and climate shown by primary colours).

Hartwood
Screenshot of a LADSS land allocation at Hartwood,
visualised using Smallworld GIS.

GIS Integration

The integration of the GIS and the G2 knowledge-base is based on the exploitation of the object-oriented paradigm common to Smallworld and G2. The implementation allows G2 to instruct the GIS (via remote procedure calls) to run spatial analytical functions and return the results for processing in the integrated impact assessments.

The G2-Smallworld bridge is a bespoke C program that handles communications between the Gensym G2 Gateway and the Smallworld Alien Co-processor.