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April 2004 |
Assessment of the use of RS and GIS in India
Methodology
In order to obtain a database for the analysis, it was assumed that important research and development applications in Remote Sensing (RS) or GIS would have been presented at major national forums and conferences. Initially, the intention was to limit the analysis to papers presented at the Map India (1998-2003) and ICORG (1997 and 2001) conferences. However, in the process a few more sources of information were added: the national meeting of the Indian Society of Geomatics (2002) and the national conference of the Geospatial Information & Technology Association (GITA) in 2003. In addition, papers presented by Indian nationals at some international conferences were also considered: the Asian Conferences on Remote Sensing (ACRS) (1989-2002), Map Asia (2002) and the Asian GPS Conference (2001). The references from the ICORG conferences were taken from the conference proceedings (ICORG, 1997, 2001), whereas all other information was obtained through the website of the GIS Development (www. gisdevelopment. net), one of the main organisers of the Map India and Map Asia conferences. In all, this resulted in 775 titles of presentations at these conferences and meetings (see Table 1). It can be seen from Table 1 that the core of the database is formed by the Map India and ICORG conferences (73.7% of the entries), whereas other sources contributed 26.3% of the entries.
Table 1 Data sources
| Source |
Year(s) |
Number of entries |
| Map India |
1998-2003 |
311 (40.1%) |
| ICORG |
1997, 2001 |
260 (33.6%) |
| Geomatics Conf |
2002 |
54 (7.0%) |
| GITA |
2003 |
2 (0.3%) |
| ACRS |
1989-2002 |
80 (10.3%) |
| Map Asia |
2002 |
39 (5.0%) |
| Asian GPS Conf |
2001 |
29 (3.7%) |
| Total |
775 |
Each entry in the database was classified according to 3 sets of criteria: (1) Technology: RS, GIS, GPS or combinations of these technologies, (2) Organisation and (3) Subject area. The organisations were distinguished in (a) Central or state government institutions, (b) Universities, and (c) Private sector and NGOs. Finally, there was a blank category, as some authors did not state their affiliation or because the affiliation could not be classified. The subject areas distinguished were: (1) Natural resources, (2) Disaster management, (3) Urban and infrastructure, (4) Socio-economics, (5) Technology and (6) Education. The papers were primarily classified by subject area, but if the emphasis was clearly on the technology, the entry was classified as technology. The same holds for the some papers on education. The results are discussed under six headings: (1) Technology, (2) Organisation, (3) Technology x Organisation, (4) Subject Area, (5) Organisation x Subject Area and (6) Technology x Subject Area.
Technology: RS, GIS or GPS
The results for this classification are summarised in Table 2, presented in the form of a matrix, where numbers on the diagonal mean that only one technology was used, e.g., GISxGIS means that only GIS was used. In other cases, two technologies were used, e.g., there were 230 papers that used both RS and GIS. In addition to the papers listed in Table 2, there were four papers that used all 3 technologies: RS, GIS and GPS. These four entries are not included in Table 2. The percentages in Table 2 refer to a total of 771 entries. It follows from Table 2 that some 75% of the papers used GIS, whereas about 50% of the papers used RS, and thus GIS was used more widely than RS.
Table 2 Classification according to the technology used
| |
GIS |
RS |
GPS |
Subtotal |
| GIS |
323 |
230 |
28 |
581(75.4%) |
| RS |
230 |
144 |
9 |
383(49.7%) |
| GPS |
28 |
9 |
37 |
74 (9.6%) |
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