Development of Web Mapping Application for Spatial Ecotourism Information Using QGIS Plugin and Freely Available Web Platforms in North West Highlands of Ethiopia a Case Study: Chokie Mountain Watersheds

Ecotourism is a sustainable, green and smokeless industry of the society by providing alternative source to the livelihood and local community, in order to re-naturalize the environment to bring the man closer to the natural environment. The use of web application has changed the way tourists gather information about tourist attraction spots of the research area. The aim of the study is to assess and identify ecotourism attraction sites of Chokie Mountain watersheds for touristic activities to develop a web-based GIS mapping portal for the improvement of nature-based ecotourism activities. The web-based GIS portal for Web Mapping Application is available for the user with the skills necessary to create standard web mapping services. We have implemented web mapping services based on formal cartographic visualization rules in the open source QGIS software and threejs JavaScript plugin. Threejs plugin is used for 3D visualization, interaction and export terrain data, map canvas image and vector data to HTML page and JS. The result of web-based GIS portal supports spatial and non-spatial database of tourist attraction and tourist service data with attractive user interface.


Introduction
Ethiopia is land of origin with vast number of tourist attractions [1] and a visitor-friendly people [2] who are conscious of its historical, cultural and natural heritages [2] [3] [4]. It was this recognition of a great potential, that the tourism industry has been started in 1960's in the country [5]. Choke Mountain watershed has tourism potentials such as the stunning landscapes like Aba Jime forests, AratMekerakir, Molalit cave, Lake BahireGiyorgies in line with unique biodiversity resources which include plant, animal, and bird species [2]. Ecotourism was first started by the Hetor Ceballos lascurain in 1983 [6]. It includes a number of different forms of tourism such as environmentally responsible nature-based travel, adventure travel, birding or camping and generally, it is a tourist activity for sustainable protection of the environment and generating sustainable income for the local community [6]. Tourism, the act of travel for the purpose [7] of relaxation, physical and mental recovery, responsible travel to natural areas [8] and business, and provide services for the tourist [9]. It is a sustainable [3] [10], nature-based [6] green and smokeless industry [7] of the society by providing sustainable environment [3] and income, good interaction with nature, people and community involvement, and action to conserve or enhance the natural environment, in order to re-naturalize the environment to bring the man closer to the ecotourism area. GIS technology has an essential computer tool for [11] [12] collecting, storing, mapping, analyzing, managing, retrieving and displaying of spatial and attribute data for geographic world of particular purpose. Web GIS is a geographic information system distributed across a networked computer environment to integrate, disseminate, and communicate geographic information visually on the World Wide Web [13]

Study Area
Chokie Mountain watersheds are the water tower of the upper Blue Nile River Basin [4] [14] (Abay) highland portions of Ethiopia, in West and East Gojjam zonal administrations, Amhara regional state northwest part of Ethiopia. Choke Mountain is the water tower of the Upper Blue Nile River Basin in Ethiopia. It is the source of more than 23 rivers and 273 small springs [2] which are the main tributaries of Upper Blue Nile river basin. The watershed located between 37˚00'00" -38˚30'00"E longitude and 9˚30'00" -11˚00'N latitude. The latitude of the area ranges from 667 m around Blue Nile George to 4100 m top of Chokie Mountain watershed. Agroecologically, Choke Mountain watersheds region (Table 1) is found within four climatic zones. These are; Kola, WeynaDega, Dega, and Wurch [14].
It is the source of more than 273 spring water and many other major rivers in the region. Choke Mountain watersheds, the water tower of the region and its

Open Source Software for Web-Based GIS
The Web GIS should be independent of [15]

Spatial Database Management Tools 1) Qgis2threejs Plugins
It is used for 3D visualization, interaction and export terrain data, map canvas image and vector data to HTML page and JS file [19]. 3D visualization based on available spatial data and Three.js library enables user-friendly interactive 3D visualization, which is accessible to a broad spectrum of users and it does not require any new software or plugins to be installed on the client or server sides.
2) Quantum GIS QGIS supports import and export of different file formats through the interaction of GDAL OGR libraries, including vector, raster and CAD data formats as Figure 2 given below. It is an open source software with more advanced cartographic features for thematic mapping [16]. The development of Web GIS and Web Mapping Applications with the QGIS MapServer provides the participants

Front End Web Development Tools
Our web application is developed based on a 3-tier client-server architecture [20] where the application is separated into 3 layers. i.e. the presentation layer which includes user interface components, the business logic layer which interfaces the presentation with the backend data (database) and the database management layer which includes the persistent data storage system. Different technologies are used to build different layers. Frontend development is all about the development of the presentation layer using client-side technologies. We used HTML, CSS and JavaScript for frontend development.

HTML, CSS and JavaScript
We used Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) [21] to design the application's organization and content, and Cascading Stylesheet (CSS) (Figure 3) Different web application frameworks available to make these HTML pages have a better look and feel. We used JavaScript which provides user interactivity with the application and is necessary to handle asynchronous communications [22] with the server.

Backend Web Development
The backend development includes the development of the business logic layer and this is implemented by server-side scripting languages such as PHP, ASP or JSP. As stated above we chose PHP as a backend development platform.

PHP scripting language
It is a widely used open source, server side, HTML embedded web scripting language that is compatible with all major web servers (notably with apache2) [23]. Being open source, cross platform, free full-featured and stable forces us to choose as the right backend development tool for our experiment.

Non-Spatial Database Management Tool
The web GIS data is known to be managed using spatial and non-spatial data management tools. As stated, we used Postgre and Quantum GIS as spatial data

Web Development Frameworks and Toolkits
The main important thing that the Object-Oriented programming methodology is that it allows to write code which is reusable across different projects. So dif-  [28]. We chose this framework based on: 1) The languages we decided as stated above; 2) Their popularity of developer community support as well as; 3) Based on the decision that which one is the latest technology.

Web GIS Development
A web-based GIS is a GIS application made available through a common web browser for [29] easy, fast and cost-effective dissemination, sharing, displaying and processing of spatial information. Together with the use of the World Wide Web, GIS could be further developed to allow many more people to have access to GIS functionality and to enhance community participation in planning.
Web-based GIS, an extension of Geographic Information System (GIS), consists of four major system components which include client for [15] sending request through web browser, web server with application server for responding to the request, map server and data server. The above four major web components would be integrated to develop web-based GIS portal for choke mountain wa- Web GIS is the process of [15] designing, implementing, generating and delivering maps on the World Wide Web by combining both the advantage of GIS and the internet. GIS-based project development consists of components such as [13] data development, data organization, and application development that are not similar and different from the standard software development processes. The major components of web application portal are categorised [9] [11] [15] [29] into navigation tools (zoom in, zoom out, zoom to full extent, selective zoom, re-centre tool, linear measuring tools), legend tools, search tools and print map tools.

Architecture and Implementation
The web application architecture in Figure 4 User side web services [30] shown below represents [9] [17] [30] the data communication link between the web service and various components.
Free and open source application platforms for [29] publishing spatial data (vector and raster data format) and interactive mapping application using QGIS freely available web-based plugin to the web have been [29] used as spatial data server.

The Web GIS Web Portal Prototype
We have developed a prototype web portal application based on the specifica  going on related to the study area. Since the area has immense capability for research and development, frequent information delivery is very important.

Home Page
The application currently is running on local development server on WAMP server installation. Since we are developing the portal app based on the laravel framework, it runs on laravel local development server on top of wamp. The researcher tries to activate the server from composer command line interface as "php artisan serve" and the server starts server with http://localhost:8000 default address. The home page is shown in Figure 5. The home page contains information such as a showcase to display informative pictures, top menu which contain home, about, programs, research and collaboration menu items to detail information related to the different programs run by Debre Markos University chokie Mountains Conservation Directorate office such as research and technology transfer, community development, thematic areas, publications and running projects and external relations.
The front page contains sections such as "our services" that advocate the services provided by the portal and "In the News" that broadcast frequent activities done by stakeholders.

Side Menu
The side menu, located at the right of the showcase, contains menu items to display information about media galleries, google map location of the study area and a link to the Web GIS map of the study area. The portal displays much other important information such as the daily weather condition of the site

Conclusions
Ecotourism is a sustainable, green and smokeless industry of the society by pro- and open source application platforms as spatial data server for publishing spatial data and interactive mapping application using QGIS freely available web-based plug-in. Open source web application software's are very easy and powerful tool to delineate, conserve and promote ecotourism areas for sustainable, smokeless and green industry of the country. Chokie Mountain watershed conservation web portal provides Geo-spatial information about the study area, General and background information, Research and project publication database, Web services and data sources for other researchers and publishes daily activities going on related to the study area.