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Regional geographic information infrastructure in the Hindu Kush – Himalayan Region
General
development and policy perspective
National Government, donors, and
international organisations need good data and tools to identify target areas
for their development projects. Moreover, the spatial impact of programmes and
policies can be estimated and evaluated.
Finally, a greater abundance of
spatial data on the HKH region will generally stimulate research in and thus
assist development. Also, it will help to put and keep the mountain regions on
the agendas of international organisations.
The above usages of the GII
are not limited to any particular thematic fields: (potential) applications can
be found in agriculture, social science, natural resources conservation and
management, infrastructure development business, to name but a few.
Implementation Strategy
Some of the steps that have been
envisaged in MENRIS are discussed below. The primary objectives of these
activities are:
- To increase the availability and accessibility of relevant geographic data
on the region.
- To enhance the exchange of geographic information within the region
The activities broadly fall under on e of these categories:
- Capacity building
- Facilitation of data exchange
- Generation of regional key datasets
Capacity
building
The substantial capacity-building activities that have been
started in the previous programme will continue under the Regional Collaborative
Programme 1999-2002 (RCP-2). However, it is hoped that the already existing
curricula and training materials and the increasing availability of qualified
staff in the partner institutions will gradually ease ICIMOD,s burden in this
regard. The increasing prevalence of standard computers in government and
academic offices will also gradually reduce the demands to supply such
equipment. However, demands for software and special equipment (digitizers,
plotters) will remain high.
Facilitation of data exchange
Metadata Server
A
substantial amount of geographic information on the Himalayan region has been
compiled by many institution, development co-operation projects, and individual
researchers . To date, most of it exists in analogue form, but there is also a
growing number of institutions and projects using GIS facilities to compile
their own databses. The problem is that this valuable information is hardly
accessible, especially after the end of the respective projects. Moreover, it
can be extremely cumbersome to retrieve ancillary information; even such basic
things as the projection system of a map are often unknown.
To improve
the access to existing and new geographic data, MENRIS tries to take a lead to
provide metadata services to the user community in and outside the region. This
has also been one of the recommendations of the Space Informatics Seminar 1996
[7] which was held in Kathmandu.
In a first step, it is planned to
document all the MENRIS data holdings. In a second phase, other existing data on
the region shall be documented as well. This would not mean that ICIMOD actually
holds that data, it just provides a pointer to the holding agency. It goes
without saying that we are again dependent on the co-operation of our regional
partner institutes and the many researchers outside the region. Finally, it is
also envisaged to make this catalogue accessible through Internet.
The
Metadata server shall document the following types of geographic data:
- Internet GIS datasets on topography, geology and soils, land cover,
hydrography, transportation, administrative units, settlements, socio-economic
statistics.
- Raw and geo-referenced satellite images which have been acquired by MENRIS
or one of the partner institutions
- Air photographs
- Possibly also paper maps on themes as above (not decided yet)
In
addition to that, the metadata server shall contain some general reference
information like national mapping systems (geodetic datum, projection, sheet
indices), satellite frame references, locations of GPS base stations, satellite
receiving stations, addresses of institutions, etc.)
However, in order
to be included in the metadata server, a dataset should fulfil certain minimal
conditions:
- Some degree of comprehensiveness in terms of area coverage and completeness:
While it will be difficult to define an exact limit as to what shall be
included, it clearly makes no sense to spend time on documenting trials and
extremely local datasets.
- The data Set must be accessible, at least under certain conditions that must
be spelled out clearly. There is no point in documenting data that will not be
released by the holding agency under any circumstances.
The metadata
server shall include a menu-driven graphical user interface which allows simple
geographical queries like: What data on landuse exists for my region of
interest? or: is my area of interest completely covered by a particular
satellite scene? this will be done by providing reference data (administrative
boundaries, hydrography, topography) from existing global datasets, and the
footprints of the datasets which are documented . The user will be enabled to
select the reference data that he wants to display, and this will be filtered
according to the currant map scale. Then he can select an area of interest and
query the metadata base according to data type (as above), keyword (e.g. geology
/ landcover / topography etc.), scale, date, etc. and display the metadata of
the query results.
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