A website for Weather Based Animal Disease Forecast project of Madras Veterinary College was recently launched by Dr. R Kadirvel, Vice Chancellor of Tamil Nadu Veterinary Animal Sciences University, Chennai . The website, www.animaldiseaseinfo.tn.nic.in, aims at projecting the research made on the spread of animal diseases and the factors that affect the same. The highlight of the site is the ”Thematic Maps” link that produces dynamic thematic/choropleth map on Animal Population data and the outbreaks of diseases. The system provides the facility for customising the data on the parameters such as range values, legends, colours, etc.
This website uses a free GIS Server called MapServer developed by University of Minnesota (http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/). MapServer is a CGI application and an open source development environment for building spatially enabled Internet applications. It runs on Linux/Apache, all flavours of UNIXes and Windows. Support for TrueType font enables local language representation. Free PHP/MapScript dll provided by DMSolutions has been used for dynamically manipulating the shape file and creating thematic maps.