Using Geographic Information Systems for Monitoring Building Maintenance at the Takoradi Port

Abstract

The maintenance of Takoradi’s port infrastructural assets, such as, buildings, roads, marine structures, tower lights, is fundamental to many a Civil Engineering department whiles access to data or information of relevant aspects of the building is critical to any further analysis. Currently, retrieval of maintenance history on these assets (buildings) for the purposes of budgeting is a time consuming activity and ineffective means of accessing information. Another problem is that though data maybe available it lacks the spatial component. To resolve the above problem, Geographical Information Systems (GIS) software together with data available for the port was used. Specifically, data regarding Takoradi Port layout in AutoCAD format (input data) was acquired. By means of the GIS software (ArcGIS), a personal geo-database was created comprising relevant feature datasets such as Land use, Marine structures, Transportation and building feature class. The input data was converted into shapefiles and subsequently stored according to the various feature classes thus created in the personal geo-database. The features were then symbolized. Relevant fields for the feature class of interest (Buildings) were created in its attribute table and then populated to facilitate the query and mapping for easy visualisation of the state of the facilities. Thematic maps were also created from Structured Query Language (SQL) queries.

Keywords: Mapping; GIS; Maintenance; Building; Geodatabase.