NRSC-DPPAWA-GWGSG

GWGSG-AUG-2015-TR-727

nrsc
BHUVAN

SYSTEM AND SOFTWARE

DESCRIPTION

National Remote Sensing Centre

Indian Space Research Organisation
Hyderabad-500 037

August 2015

Document Control Sheet

1

Security
Classification

Public

Distribution

To all Data Contributors and Users of Bhuvan in Government

Departments, Academic & Research institutions, Private
industry and Public

Document
Issue:

Report Type

Technical

Report No

NRSC-DPPAWA-GWGSG-AUG-2015-TR-727

Title

Bhuvan System and Software Description

Collation

Pages
18

Project

BHUVAN

Author(s)

Arulraj.M, BWSD

10

Affiliation of authors

NRSC

11

Security
Mechanism

12

Originating unit

NRSC

13

Date of Initiation

August, 2015

14

Date of Publication

August, 2015

(a) Issue-01,
2015

August,

Reviewed by
GD, G & WGS

(b) Revision:

Figures
6

References
12

Approved by
DD (RSAA)

Abstract (with Keywords):

This document provides the Bhuvan System Architecture and System design
and implementation details. It also provides various data standards and
specifications being used in the Bhuvan. The detailed Bhuvan software
functions and features are listed in this document

Keywords: Bhuvan, Bhuvan-2D, Bhuvan-3D, System Architecture, System

Design and Implementation, Standards, Specifications, Functions, use-cases,
System security.

Bhuvan System & Software Description

Contents
Sl.No

Topic

Page Numbers

Introduction

System Architecture

System Design and Implementation

Standards

Functions / Features

Development Environment

12

Use cases and Outreach

12

System Security

12

Future plans

12

Bhuvan System & Software Description

ii

List of Figures
Figure 1 : Overall Bhuvan architecture present
Figure 2 : Location of Data centers for Bhuvan Distributed systems
Figure 3 : Bhuvan Federated Servers
Figure 4 : Bhuvan landing page depicting major components
Figure 5 : Simplified Process Flow Bhuvan
Figure 6 : Replication and load balancing of Databases

Bhuvan System & Software Description

iii

Bhuvan ISROs Geo-Platform

Browse, Visualise, Create, Analyse, Share and Host

Bhuvan Software Design and Implementation

National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC),

ISRO, Hyderabad

http://bhuvan.nrsc.gov.in

12 August 2015

Bhuvan System & Software Description

iv

1. Introduction
Bhuvan (the name is derived from the Sanskrit word which means Earth), a Geoplatform
of ISRO (http://bhuvan.nrsc.gov.in) was launched on 12 August 2009 by MoS, Prime
Minister Office. Since its launch it has taken many steps forward to reach Users with wide
range of services and applications. In this time frame, several major and minor releases
are made with varied features and advanced analytical capabilities.
Design and development of Bhuvan has been evolved through Open Source Geospatial
solutions following ISROs Software design standards based on IEEE 12207 and all
services are made available as OGC Complaint Web services while disseminating to the
users towards interoperability. Thus, Bhuvan's versatile tools support development of
interactive applications for visualisation, querying, analysis and becoming platform for
users to share their ideas, create their custom applications, and make more versatile
Earth Browser with participatory approach. Bhuvan has also been recognized by OGC as
website of the month in December, 2010.
(http://www.opengeospatial.org/pressroom/newsletters/201012/#C4).

2. System Architecture
The Bhuvan application is a web based multi-tiered architecture with browser based client
access over the public Internet. Very high Internet bandwidth for is provided for Bhuvan
services through Internet Service Provider (ISP) via fiber Ethernet interface and required
redundancies. The public IPs are issued by ISP in order to host the website and for
various applications. There are a number of web servers and application servers hosting
the required middleware and application software, connected with devices like routers
and firewalls as essential part of the Bhuvan infrastructure. There are also additional
servers to manage and facilitate the infrastructure including storage and network.
Network mass storage (SAN and NAS) and high performance SAN shared file system
also constitute a significant component in Bhuvan architecture. All servers and storage
are connected by means of a Gigabit Ethernet network as well as Fibre Channel SAN
switch based network. The existing Bhuvan architecture is shown in the following figure
(Figure 1).
At the moment, the present systems architecture is hosted from NRSC consisting of
following servers catering to varieties of appliations, such as, 3D image rendering,
Collaboration Service, Metadata, 2D applications, Web services, Database, FTP services,
Storage management, Open Data Archival and download services, Authentication
services, Geo-processing, Thematic data Services and Mapper and many more.

Bhuvan System & Software Description

BHUVAN ARCHITECTURE
Internet
Router
Load Balancer

Firewall

Web Servers
Ethernet Switch

FTP Server
Storage management server
NOEDA
Central Authentication Server
Geoprocessing server
Thematic data Services
Mapper

3D Servers
Collaboration Service
Metadata server
2D application server
Database server
Development server

Load Balancers

Server Firm

1
7

1
8

1
9

2
0

2
1

2
3

U ID

1
7

1
8

1
9

2
0

2
1

2
3

U D
I

R e es t

G
4 S
b A N S w hcti
R e es t

G
4 S
b A N S w hcti

Redundant SAN Switches for

High Availability

Multiple paths to SAN

Storage

Back up Tape Library

Storage

Figure 1 : Overall Bhuvan architecture present

2.1 Initiatives
Starting with 3D visualization in Windows environment, Bhuvan has come out with
various features and applications like platform and plug-in independent 2D, multi-lingual,
online shape file creation, free data download, interoperable OGC web services, My Map,
My GIS and many more based on user demand and requirements towards societal good
and better usability. The successful showcasing of various visualization and thematic
services has resulted in further demands on Bhuvan to provide platform to host various
applications from user end. Hence, Bhuvan also now provides platform to users to host
their applications through spatial mashups, starting with map centric application to user
centric applications like Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) for Important Bird Area
(IBA) Mapping and Birds migration, Sarva Shikshya Abhiyan of Andhra Pradesh, Punjab
Remote Sensing Centre (PRSC) for Tourism Web GIS for Amritsar City, Karnataka
Forest Department for Online Forest monitoring etc.
After successful realization of above spatial mashups, various new services are also
currently being implemented in Bhuvan (more than 64 Projects) to cater the requirements
as a outcome of Effective use of Space Technology in various ministries and
Governance portals for state governments:

Ministry of Road Transport and Highways

Ministry of Culture

Bhuvan System & Software Description

Indian Railways
Space based Information Support for Decentralised Planning (SIS-DP) project
Augmented Irrigation Benefit Programme (AIBP) project
National Urban Information System (NUIS) project/ Ministry of Urban
Development etc.

The above represents only a small fraction of the demand or the growth potential. It is
envisaged that there would be huge growth in hosted services down the line even as
richer functionalities (which are under development) are deployed in Bhuvan.

2.2 Distributed node setup

In view of the above, considering the need to enhance the Bhuvan infrastructure to meet
the increased demands of the current and to cater to the future growth. Based on the
requirements, the Bhuvan distributed architecture design is evolved and its overview
schematic is given in Figure 2. At the moment specific services are operational from
Regional Remote Sensing Centres (4 centres) of NRSC and NESAC, Shillong.
Distributed architecture enables improved services and at the same time efficiency of
services from Bhuvan. This concept is planned to grow across the country with more
external nodes of Bhuvan for distributed computing and services.

Figure 2 : Location of Data centers for Bhuvan Distributed systems

2.3 Bhuvan Scale up Infrastructure & Federated Servers

Bhuvan federated servers from state/central government departments from the country
are in pipeline for further leveraging the hosting capability besides high availability and
sharing the computational load. A Major Infrastructure upgrade is being planed in the
near future that will have 100s of servers, very large storage and a scaled up data centre
concept which will be ready in phases during 2015 and 2016.

Bhuvan System & Software Description

Figure 3 : Bhuvan Federated Servers

3. System Design and Implementation

Starting with visualisation services in Plug-in based windows application in 2009, Bhuvan
now is evolved as a Geo-platform by having In-house and Indigenous development using
Open Source Geospatial Solutions.
The user-friendly, web rich Bhuvan 3D requires good amount of system resources and
bandwidth to have rich user experience besides the native plug in to accelerate the
visualization. By analyzing the feedback from different user community, its understood
that users with limited system resources and bandwidth require an alternate system to
visualize this rich Indian Earth Observation Visualisation System. Thus, the requirement
of Bhuvan 2D is emerged and design is evolved in 2010. While designing the Bhuvan 2D,
the following criterias is given very high value to meet the user requirements.
1. Plug-in independent application to make a smooth entry to the application and
avoid the download time of plug-in.
2. Cross Platform and browser compatibility
3. Minimum system resources.
4. OGC
compliance
interoperability.

Web

Services

(WMS/WMTS/WFS/WPS)

towards

5. Open Source Geospatial Solutions towards nullifying the initial and maintenance
costs of the COTS packages.
To fulfill the above requirements, Bhuvan 2D has been developed using the very robust
Open Source Geospatial solutions to organize the satellite imageries and map data along
with myriad information geographically with no server - side dependencies in an easy
way. Widely-used general-purpose scripting language and A high-performance, featurepacked Open Source javascript library are used for making dynamic, interactive and rich
Web application. Thus, the entire development and deployment of Bhuvan 2D is
Bhuvan System & Software Description

accomplished using open source solution. This modular framework is evolved as various
other applications like NRSC Open EO Data Archive and Thematic Services in 2011 and
Collaborative applications towards Geoplatform like Amritsar Tourism GIS and Karnataka
Forest Applications in 2012 and Governance in 2014 having CERT-IN certified for
application security. From visualization services to platform enabling users to host
applications, following are the major components of Bhuvan as shown in Figure 4.

Visualization and Free Download

Maps & OGC Services
Applications
State Portals
Crowd Sourcing

Figure 4 : Bhuvan landing page depicting major components

3.1 Deployment and System Processes

Effective deployment of Bhuvan requires a multi server configuration where the robust,
interoperable, advanced data server, application server and web server are required as
individual identities and installed and configured in network architecture with appropriate
caching mechanism and security to provide the high available services to the users.
Some of the services are also enabled under SSL - Secure Sockets Layer to provide
secure connection between internet browsers and websites.

3.1.1 Browser Application process

In system architecture and process flow of Bhuvan, there are two major components i.e.
Server side process and Client side process. In the server side process, web server,
application server and database servers are configured, while in client side configuration,
a simple web browser along with network connection is required to access Bhuvan. All
these server side components are configured for best performance having high
availability from cluster (Vertical and Horizontal) of servers with proper multi-threading,
compression, caching, expiry etc.

Bhuvan System & Software Description

Figure 5 describes how different components of Bhuvan are linked through the simplified
process flow.

Web Browser

Rich Web Map library

Feature Viewer
or Editor

Map
Viewer

Application Server

WMS(Maps)

WFS(Features)

Map drawing

Feature Data

Data stores
Vector

Raster

Attributes

Shape files

TIFF

RDBMS

Figure 5 : Simplified Process Flow Bhuvan

In the current development of Bhuvan application, all Raster and vector Layers are
published as Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) - Web Map Service (WMS) and Web
Map Tile Service (WMTS) having queryable option for better rendering with Styled Layer
Description (SLD). For online editing and dynamic processing, privileged users are also
enabled Web Feature Service (WFS) for online editing. The TileCache library can speed
up access to your WMS by factors of 10-100, or more and handle more requests per
second.
Bhuvan System & Software Description

3.1.2 Mobile data process

The dataset sent by the mobile app reaches Bhuvan server where it is organized in a well
designed enterprise database management system. Cluster of Geo-RDBMS with
indexing and tuned with better performance parameters are exploited to store the spatial
components of Geodata from the crowd to ensure High Availability, Load Balancing &
Replication.
The non-spatial datasets are stored in a well structured file system with proper
configuration for better read/write operations. Scheduled compression of files is done
besides mobile level compression and the file structure is maintained in such a way to
avoid more number of files in the same folder. This ensures reduction of latency of read
and ensures quick display on the webpage.

Figure 6 : Replication and load balancing of Databases

4. Standards
Large volume of Geospatial datasets (Raster and Vector) along with non-spatial datasets
were created and organized during the development and deployment of Bhuvan. These
huge amounts of spatial data in both Vector and Raster format were organized in
centralized server to facilitate the network based applications development.
The spatial resolutions of raster data sets stored in Bhuvan varied from 500 m to 1 m.
The image sizes of these raster data sets are very high. Therefore, the web rendering of
these heavy size raster data sets with traditional web mapping techniques is not very
effective. So development of Asynchronous Web services and image tiling techniques
(predefined standard size with Bhuvan & NRSC/ISRO watermarks) are the
advancements in Web-based GIS applications/visualisation to tackle the performance
and bandwidth issues in the multi-user environment.

Bhuvan System & Software Description

4.1

Raster data specifications

Horizontal & Vertical

WGS-84

Projection / Coordinate System

GCS

Color Composite

NCC

Tile Indexing

Open Series Map of Survey of India

Tile Overlap

>20 pixels

Enhancement

Localized Enhancement

Format

Geotif

Radiometric Resolution

8bit

Terrabytes of data consisting of Multi-resolution, temporal, sensor raster data are stored
with above specifications besides 30 products of large amount of data are stored with
above specifications.

4.2

Vector data specifications

Projection: Geographic
Datum: WGS 84
Format: Shape File/Geo-RDBMS.

Gigabytes of data consisting of large number ofthemes of variable scales are stored with
above specifications.

4.3

Attributes
Format: Geo-RDBMS.

More than 8 million data consisting of various dynamic like AWS and monitoring data sets
like Crop, Disaster are stored with above specifications.

4.4

Metadata
NSDI Consists of overall 10 fields i.e. 9 mandatory fields and 1 additional
field on Data Quality for vector and raster datasets.
WMO - consists of overall 13 fields for Meteorology (weather and climate),
operational hydrology and related geophysical sciences.

Bhuvan System & Software Description

4.5

Data Sharing

Towards enabling Interoperability, all the datasets stored in the centralized servers are
shared as web services (XML, OGC Web Services). There are around 46 OGC standards
at present including WMS, WMTS, WPS, WFS, WCS, GML, KML, City GML, Open LS
etc. Bhuvan Services are shared to the users as WMS, WMTS, KML and WFS for
specific users.

5. Functions / Features
As a Geoplatform, Bhuvan provides versatile tools support development of interactive
applications for visualisation, querying, analysis, share their ideas, create their custom
applications, and make more versatile Earth Browser with participatory approach.

5.1 Tools available in Bhuvan -2D, NOEDA, Thematic Services,

Projects
I.

Visualization Tools
1. Fixed Zoom - In
2. Fixed Zoom- Out
3. Rubber Zoom - In
4. Rubber Zoom Out
5. Navigation map as overlay (Hybrid view)
6. History Previous Extent (Go Back to Previous Extent)
7. History Next Extent
(Go to Next Extent)
8. Zoom To Initial Extent
9. PanZoomBar
10. Controls to move top, left, right, bottom.
11. Adjustable Transparency tool
12. Identify(Information on Mouse click /hover)
13. Time series visualization with slider and swipe capability
14. Opacity tool
15. Interactive user inputting system with multi-slider
16. Satellite, Map and Hybrid view towards intuitive visualization
17. Terrain View
18. Virtual grouping of layers and visualization

II.

Draw Tools
1. Point
2. Line
3. Polygon
4. Online Shapefile Creation (Point , Line, Polygon)

III. Measure Tools

1. Distance
2. Area

Bhuvan System & Software Description

IV. Analysis Tools

1. Statistics (State wise, District wise, Area of Interest)
2. Clip &Ship( Get Data through FTP after signing MOU)
3. Custom Query Shell
4. Interactive Drawing(Rectangle, Polygon)
5. Swipe Tool
V.

General Tools
1. Send Mail
2. Embeddable HTML
3. Status Bar (On MouseHover of Map display of Lat,Lon )
4. WMS Manager
5. Search (Search by Lat,Lon and Place name)
6. Search Nearby Places (Proximity Analysis)
7. Get Directions (Routing)
8. Add Layer (Adding of WMS Layers, Uploading of Shapefiles and Publishing as
WMS Layers)
9. Print based on view extent with Scale and legend ( Layout)
10. Show/Hides Panel
11. OGC web Services (WMS, WMTS) to the users.

5.2
I.

II.

Tools available in Bhuvan -3D

Visualization Tools
1. Fixed Zoom - In
2. Fixed Zoom- Out
3. Navigation Map from Rediff Maps
4. Controls to move top, left, right, bottom.
5. Identify(Information on Mouse click /hover)
6. Fly -In
7. Fly-Out
8. Jump In
9. Jump out
10. Fly Around
11. 3D city models
12. Info tool (Lat, lon and elevation)
13. Head up display (HUD)
14. Navigation Controls
15. Tilt Slider (control to rotate globe)
16. North Indicator
17. Opacity
18. 2D & 3D switch based on extent and altitude
Draw Tools
a. Standard
1. Marker
2. Free Hand Drawing

Bhuvan System & Software Description

10

3.
b.

Image Overlay

2D Objects
1. Point
2. Line
3. Polygon
4. Regular Polygon
5. 2D Arrow
6. Circle
7. Free Hand Drawing
8. Online Shapefile Creation (for Line, point, Polygon)

c. 3D Objects
1. Box
2. Cylinder
3. Sphere
4. Cone
5. Pyramid
6. 3D Arrow
d.
Urban Design
1. Road builder with trees
2. Junctions
3. Traffic lights
III.

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.

Measure Tools
Distance
Area
Query on Terrain
Vertical Distance
Terrain Profile
Contour Map

1.
2.
3.
4.

GIS Tools
Threat Dome
Buffer
Find Objects
Video on Terrain

IV.

V.

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.

General Tools
GPS Tool ( Live track and play back)
Search (Search by Lat,Lon and Place name)
Add Layer s(Adding of WMS Layers, Shpefiles, KML files, WFS Layers, fly files,
Elevation, Imagery layers) and save option as Public and private layers
Print ( View based screenshot)
Show/Hides Panel
Sign In ( Central Authentication)
Add Content ( Volunteered Geographic Information)
Developers Tool ( Sharing API)

Bhuvan System & Software Description

11

9.
10.
11.
12.

Communities (Collaboration through Text, Voice, sharing of Terrain)

Add Album(Photos)
Shadow
News ( Live feed from Times of India)

6. Developer Environment
Service oriented Architecture (SOA) of Bhuvan in which application components provide
services to other components via a communications, typically over a network. The
principles of service-orientation are independent of any vendor, product or technology
towards interoperability. This enables bhuvan as a platform to users to bring out versatile
applications through participatory GIS.
Application framework is shared with users to have a rapid application development
having OGC web Services and host through FTP like Nashik Police Application, Search &
Rescue for Disaster, NDRF, NUIS, GAIL etc.

7. Use cases and Outreach

Since its advent, Bhuvan is being referred in several forums, journals, blogs for its usage.
There are more than 60 applications developed using bhuvan application framework and
hosted for various users covering NGOs (BNHS), Central Ministries (MoWR, MoEF&CC,
MHA etc), State Governments (Punjab, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana) to name
a few. Bhuvan receives about 5 million hits per month having about 30 thousand
cumulative monthly unique visitors and crosses free data download of about 3.5 lakhs.
In collaboration with academic institutes for the benefit of users in 2011, 5 one day
workshops have been conducted and 7 one day workshops have been conducted in 2012
and benefitted by approximately 2500 users covering students, researchers, educators,
NGOs, Government and Industry officials etc. Apart from the exclusive Bhuvan
workshops, as part of the RAY workshop, approximately 250 town planners were trained
and approximately 3000 planners were trained as part of NUIS workshop for master plan
preparation, three 2 days bhuvan training in 2015 with total 75 participants and
Customised Bhuvan training programme for ENVIS officials of 26 officers, also Bhuvan
capabilities are regularly exhibited as part of the various conferences in Geospatial
domain held in India.

8. System Security
All Infrastructure, Data and Application are ensured with proper security mechanism
towards high availability. Multi-tier server applications are hosted by hardening operating
systems with firewall to avoid any intrusion; Raster and Vector datasets are cached and
served to the user by avoiding direct access; application developed are CERT-In certified
for security.

9. Future Plans
Many more value added functions and features are planned that will be added from time
to time. Particular interest of ISRO/DOS would be to provide such functionalities to
common man to engage in participatory approach coupled with tools for scientists to
solve simple problems easily and interactively. To state few that is planned in near future
Bhuvan System & Software Description

12

are Online Geo-processing towards interoperability as Web Processing Services(WPS)

for realizing Bhuvan as one-stop versatile ISROs Geo-Platform, Uniform High resolution
data (1m) for entire nation, Distributed Architecture for Bhuvan to improve the user
experience, Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN) for all Indian Earth
Observation Datasets for discovery to evaluation and exploitation, Robust Bhuvan API for
customized add-ons / apps, Robust RS Data Archive and Dissemination System to
access land cover change for local to global systems (Enhanced NOEDA), Enhanced
Bhuvan Thematic Services to cater various themes, Disaster Information & Management
Support ,Customized Bhuvan Mobile apps to cater various user needs towards user
centric map applications etc.

Bhuvan System & Software Description

13