Integration of geo imagery and vector data into school mapping gis data-model for educational decision support system in jordan

The objective of this work is to build a proper Geographic Information System (GIS) data-model that can be used for school mapping planning, where all schools with attribute data would be available for problem solving and decision-making in Education. Thus, the end product of the GIS will be part of an Educational Decision Support System that provides the user with a map of specific region with focus on the schools locations and all related info to assist decision-makers in either expanding current school or suggesting sites for new schools in Jordan, and also, for student and resources location/allocation. The built GIS-Data-model is composed of the schools layer, large-scale streets, directorates, sub-districts and Governorate layers with population data. IKONOS Geo imagery and more reliable small-scale vector data format are to be integrated with the current GIS-data-model to build a detailed geospatial-database for school mapping planning purposes. However, there are several problems associated with this mainly because of the different projection systems each dataset is based on and due to the scale problems. This paper reviews the original GIS-data-model format, the used projection systems, the management of the geospatial database and aspects of the project to collect data from ground and satellite semi-rectified image sources and combine the data sets together so that a high level of tractability and integrity are offered. A status report of the existing uses of the model is given together with an outlook of expected future uses as an Educational Decision Support System for planning purposes. The paper concludes with the future trend to build an Internet Wep-mapping site to be available to fit various needs for GIS School Mapping applications, which would be perfect for decentralizing the Decision Support System between Educational Directorates for data updates.