Web GIS Application for Real-time Highway Incident Reporting in KeNHA – Nairobi Region Leveraging on Social Media

Abstract

The road incidences occur everywhere on the roads. However, road users and witnesses of road incidences lack a medium of reporting the information for timely response. The authorities lack concrete evidence to solve road incidents since there is no proper road incident reporting system. With the increase of use of smart phones in Kenya, an opportunity exists because of the untapped gap of incident reporting. The objective of the research was to develop a web GIS road incident reporting system that will contribute to road safety by improving reporting and response as well as improving the dissemination and analysis of information arising from the incidents. In this project a web application that can be used to report road incidents was developed by coding and harnessing the ArcGIS Enterprise platform. The system has a real time data collection and reporting of the incidences as reported and response. The application developed was able to scrape the social media data from Twitter, Flicker, and Webcams among others and the interface for reporting was successfully used by citizens to report road incidents. The dashboard created for visualization of the incidences was also successful. The benefits of the system will be location based and real-time data collection which will enable prompt management of the incidences to avoid inconvenience to road users, quick resolution and easier decision making, hence improving the effectiveness and efficiency in service delivery. The big data from social media posed challenges in filtering the information into useful data for the system. However this was overcome by assigning incident category and filtering using a dictionary of key words. There was also the challenge to verify the incidences reported whether they actually occurred. In conclusion, the project achieved the aim to develop a web based application for incident reporting and highly recommend the road Authorities such as KeNHA among others to adopt and implement it.