ArcGIS-based development of a land subsidence information management system using C/S and B/S mixing mode strategy: A case study in North China plain

Land subsidence has become one of the incontestable environmental disasters in North China Plain, which has a strong negative impact on the development of local community economy. In order to study the current situation and evolving tendency of subsidence, and accordingly to enhance the level of subsidence prevention and control, a custom-built information system was determined to be developed. This paper elaborates the overall process of software development from the system architecture design to functionality implementation. A mixing mode of C/S and B/S was applied to increase the using flexibility of the system. The subsystem based on C/S mode, for specialized users, was run in Intranet with characteristics of high speed, powerful functionality and tight security, and the other subsystem based on B/S was designed for public users with less functionality in Internet and Browse environment. These two seeming independent subsystems connect a same spatial dataset through ArcGIS SDE technology, in which all the spatial data was organized and stored in Geodatabase model. In C/S subsystem, a methodology of table data relating and filtering was used to regionalize the discrete spatio-temporal field monitoring data. Our subsidence information Management system facilitates to share data socially, provide end-users a cost-saving solution to access up-to-date spatial datasets customized for a specific topic to different users with limited or enough GIS knowledge.