Developing a web mapping application for managing and visualization of the location of Kenya Ports Authority land parcels in Mombasa.

Abstract

In the year 2017 Kenya Ports Authority land audit, it was reported that Mombasa County has 90% of the land parcels used by the agency for its operations. The number of parcels allocated and owned by KPA in Mombasa is 171, based on land ownership documents provided by KPA land survey division; the land documents includes certificate of leases and land titles. From the 171 parcel ownership documents, only 65 of the land documents indicated the parcel acreage while 106 documents did not indicate land parcel acreage or were not legible. This research project aimed at filling the gaps in information from the audit report that is important for use and is not readily available on land ownership documents. The web application was developed using Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) web development tools. Tools such as QuantumGIS (QGIS), HyperText Mark-up Language (HTML), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), GeoJSON, LeafletJS, Apache Tomcat, JavaScript and Open layers, notepad++ were selected for the web application development. These FOSS tools were used to create and deploy a web application that will provide a better option for KPA stakeholders to quickly access information about parcels in the office or in the field without referring to paper survey plans. In creating this web application, survey plans for land parcels available paper formats were collected from Survey of Kenya (SOK), digitized and resultant Geographic Information Systems (GIS) vector data overlaid online on interchangeable Google Maps and OpenStreetMaps (OSM) base maps to provide contextualization of parcel location. Furthermore, the web application provides a scalable, portable and efficient online platform that can be used to retrieve timely and useful information about parcel size, location and additional information about parcels not available on survey plans i.e. ownership/lessee of land. This web mapping application provides a web-based land information system that can be utilized by all stakeholders involved in parcels related activities for Kenya Ports Authority (KPA). The stakeholders include; high level managers, mid-level managers and technicians in constructions within the port The web application provides a user friendly interface that provides quick answers about the physical location, size, perimeter and current use of land. More so the web application allows the user to view additional information such as the current owner of parcels/lessee and market value of the parcels. In conclusion, this research project can be scaled up to integrate all land in Kenya belonging to KPA to ease parcel management activities. This research project conclusively achieved all its objectives since all users of the web platform developed can accurately measure areas of parcels, view the location of parcels on an earth model such as Google maps and be able to view additional information regarding a parcel via a pop up window The project can also be adopted by government and non-government agencies that own large number of parcels for ease of land information management.