NEAREST NEIGHBOR AND HUB-LINE ANALYSIS FOR SITE SELECTION

Here is a section of a map showing religious features, roads and community settlements in two different local government areas in Imo state.

Our client (A Christian organization) has asked that we produce a map of the area with all its branches identified. This map is needed to help decision makers select most suitable site for new church branches, where needed most.

Armed with LGA shapefile for the federation, the 27 LGA’s in Imo state were extracted, from which the area of study (Ohaji/Egbema and Oguta) were extracted.

The details of the major communities within these two LGA‘s were extracted from Google-Earth extension in QGIS

In QGIS environment, shapefiles were created for settlements, churches, roads, and market; and presented in map form for printing.

To make more spatial sense out of the map, the church feature was subjected to a nearest neighbor analysis to determine them shortest mean distance between all the churches identified, and also for the particular denomination.

To even draw more insight from the map, a hub-line analysis was done to determine which church was serving the communities, based on proximity.

Result from the hub-line analysis was queried to show community settlements which are more than 1Km from any church, as being highly suitable sites for church expansion.

The result from the two analyses were copied and pasted as part of the report from the project.