Creating a System for Storing, Processing and Presenting Geotechnical Information for Ghana

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6463-258-3_70How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Geotechnical Data/Information; Geopandas; Ghana

Abstract

Site investigation is crucial to any civil engineering or land development project. The geotechnical information acquired through site investigations is essential for the safe and economical design of buildings and infrastructural works. The field and laboratory tests (critical components of site investigations) required to obtain this geotechnical information can be expensive, time-consuming, and destructive. Acquiring preliminary geotechnical details on a site for a proposed civil engineering infrastructure helps make design and construction decisions. It can also help guide the detailed investigations that have to be conducted at proposed sites. Such preliminary geotechnical information will help reduce the cost and time required to carry out these investigations.

Geotechnical engineers would preferably want to obtain preliminary geotechnical information on a site from existing field logs and geotechnical reports. However, such documents are often not readily available because they are usually kept in hard copies instead of in a central place. A central repository for storing these data in an online database will be handy for accessing preliminary geotechnical information for civil engineering projects. This paper describes a project to create a system that stores, analyses, updates data, and provides geotechnical information in tables and maps. The project relied on secondary data from past and present geotechnical investigations. Available field and laboratory testing results from various site investigations conducted across some parts of Ghana were compiled in Excel and then stored and processed using Python Geopandas. The project team created geodatabase and thematic maps, which showed the spatial variations of some selected soil parameters.

The created geodatabase and thematic maps supply preliminary geotechnical information on sites that enable engineers to obtain such information on proposed civil engineering projects more efficiently, cheaply, and sustainably.

Copyright

© 2023 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Nancy Anataba Kyorku Dzikunu-Bansah
AU  - Felix J. F. Ayeh
PY  - 2023
DA  - 2023/11/08
TI  - Creating a System for Storing, Processing and Presenting Geotechnical Information for Ghana
BT  - Proceedings of the Rocscience International Conference  (RIC 2023)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 763
EP  - 769
SN  - 2589-4943
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-258-3_70
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-258-3_70
ID  - Dzikunu-Bansah2023
ER  -