REMOTE SENSING AND GIS INTEGRATION FOR HOUSE MANAGEMENT

House management is very important in water resource protection in order to provide sustainable drinking water for about four millions population in northern Taiwan. House management can be a simple job that can be done without any ingredient of remote sensing or geographic information systems. Remote sensing and GIS integration for house management can provide more efficient management prescription when land use enforcement, soil and water conservation, sewage management, garbage collection, and reforestation have to be managed simultaneously. The objective of this paper was to integrate remote sensing and GIS to manage houses in a water resource protection district. More than four thousand houses have been surveyed and created as a house data base. Site map of every single house and very detail information consisting of address, ownership, date of creation, building materials, acreages floor by floor, parcel information, and types of house condition. Some houses have their photos in different directions. One house has its own card consists these information and these attributes were created into a house data base. Site maps of all houses were created with the same coordinates system as parcel maps, topographic maps, sewage maps, and city planning maps. Visual Basic.NET, Visual C#.NET have been implemented to develop computer programs for house information inquiry and maps overlay among house maps and other GIS map layers. Remote sensing techniques have been implemented to generate the background information of a single house in the past 15 years. Digital orthophoto maps at a scale of 1:5000 overlay with house site maps are very useful in determination of a house was there or not for a given year. Satellite images if their resolutions good enough are also very useful in this type of daily government operations. The developed house management systems can work with commercial GIS software such as ArcView and ArcPad. Remote sensing provided image information of a single house whether it was there or not in a given year. GIS provided overlay and inquiry functions to automatically extract attributes of a given house by ownership, address, and so on when certain house management prescriptions have to be made by government agency. File format is the key component that makes remote sensing and GIS integration smoothly. The developed house management systems are user friendly and can be modified to meet needs encountered in a single task of a government technician.