Abstract

Geographical Information System (GIS) is a dominant technology for spatial analysis. The capabilities of GIS for supporting decision making process have been widely used in enormous kind of applications. Health, local authority, military and planning are some of the users that utilize the GIS abilities. Although the technology is extremely excellent, but it has not been fully utilized in the plantation sector especially in paddy management. Presently, in MADA area, monitoring of paddy maturity is based on the conventional method which largely based on the hard copy map and tabular data form. As a result, the data manipulation is difficult and very slow in supporting paddy efficiency management especially on yield prediction, disease precaution and growth pattern. Another major problem in paddy plantation is information interaction. Interaction can be classified as a set of information related to farmer's sponsor and agency (MADA). Without proper information, an accurate and immediate action is difficult to execute. This research aims to develop more systematic paddy maturity monitoring system and generate a simple yield prediction model based on field activities. This pilot study covers MADA area of Tambun Tulang, Arau, Perlis. GIS, Map Object and Visual Basic have been used in the development process. The Map Object links to several GIS application modules supporting GIS analysis function and the Visual Basic is used as the interfacing programming language. The black box and white box tests are applied to check the smoothness of the developed system. The system operates within GIS environment which extremely enhancing the effectiveness of spatial based paddy maturity monitoring application and assisting in the yield prediction. The system is user friendly in design to ensure the non GIS users can operate with ease. The research output at Paddy System has proven its ability to enhance paddy growth data management, stakeholder, interaction and yield prediction based on current activity and not on the actual yield as currently practiced. The feedback shown that, 80% of the MADA officers agree with the system's performance