 Harshavardhan M Senior Practice Manager - Technology Research, GIS Development Email: harsha.m@GISdevelopment.net It was at the 28th Indian National Cartographic Association (INCA) Congress last November that Dr Madhavan Nair, Chairman, ISRO announced ‘Bhuvan’, an the IRS image portal and ‘Bhoo Sampada’, an information portal. Within a year, ISRO delivered its promise by launching the information portal this January and the Bhuvan Beta version last month. According to Dr Nair, “These are not mere image or information browsers, but are the mechanisms for providing satellite images and thematic maps to the user community for the purpose of development planning”. An interesting observation is that a majority of us have not noticed Bhoo Sampada, but are already showing interest in Bhuvan. Even newspaper headlines touted Bhuvan as “India's answer to Google Earth”; and “ISRO takes on Google”. Better late than never, India has finally joined the ‘Digital Earth’ race that started in 2005 by NASA, later popularised by Google, Microsoft and a few others. Digital Earth - The Genesis Ten years ago, the then US Vice-President Al Gore articulated a vision of a virtual globe and baptised it the “Digital Earth” as a multi-resolution, three-dimensional representation of the planet that would make it possible to find, visualise, and make sense of vast amounts of geo-referenced information on the physical and social environment. NASA’s 'World Wind' was among the first of the DEs released in 2004. Next came Google Earth in 2005 followed by Virtual Earth from Microsoft in 2006. GIS as a way to organise information is not new, and we have seen developments happening in this area in the form of Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs). Another example in this category is the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), which started with the aim to promote scientific connections between the observing systems. Though these are not in common use, they are popular within the GI community and other stakeholders involved with the creation of SDIs. They are managed by government agencies, and are not widely publicised nor are they aimed at mass consumption with most of the datasets under the restrictions of a legal framework. The former digital earths are by the IT industry aimed at publishing and monetising and designed for lay public, with none or few restrictions on data. These public domain offerings, most of them 'free', evinced great interest due to the high resolution imagery available in most. Concepts like ‘Locate your House!’ later grew into the idea of crowd sourcing, also referred to as Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). Another major breakthrough came when the developers made their APIs (Application Program Interfaces) available for creating interesting mash-ups. With such concepts, digital earths were able to grab the attention of mainstream IT and internet users alike. Another noteworthy observation is that an increasing number of public sector agencies are using these platforms to visualise their data. Few examples include Cadastre of Spain and European Environment Agency (Craglia et.al 2008). Bhuvan - The Indian Digital Earth Bhuvan is a geoportal to explore and discover virtual earth in 3D space with specific emphasis on the Indian region. It aims at showcasing Indian imaging capabilities in multi- sensor, multi-platform and multi-temporal domains. To access Bhuvan, users need to install a plug-in, which supports Internet Explorer 6.0 or above, Mozilla Firefox 3.5.1 or above, Netscape 6.0 or above on Windows platform. Features Bhuvan comes with a base layer and the images are a combination of data from various IRS sensors taken in the last three years. According to the FAQ section , Bhuvan, on release, contains IRS satellite images from OCM, AWiFS, LISS3, and LISS4 sensors. The section adds that more data will be added from time to time. Presently for Delhi, the data is from the IRS-P6 LISS III, dated April 2006.  The vector and thematic layers available in Bhuvan are a) Administrative layers ranging from country to taluka (sub-district) level; with limited data for features like villages, water bodies (reservoirs and rivers), wasteland, soil maps and transportation limited to national highways. It presently doesnot serve street level data and the vector layers suffer rendering issues due to varying scales. A novel feature is visualising multi-resolution, multisensor, multi-temporal data. Datasets included in this category are Ocean Colour Monitor, AWiFS, Drought and Flood Maps. No competition with GE One question that comes to the mind is how good is the data. There is nothing stated on the site. The official blog of Bhuvan says, “We are not competing with Google Earth”. Yet, in the same post it says, “If Google Earth shows details up to 200 metres distance and Wikimapia up to 50 metres, Bhuvan will show images up to 10 metres”. The post goes a step further and tries to bring in a comparison with GE. Security regulations The Bhuvan FAQ states “DOS/ISRO/NRSC complies with the security regulations of the Government of India on satellite data published on this site”. Section 4 of the Remote Sensing Policy has restrictions pertaining to the satellite data which is of resolution 5.8 m or above. So if high resolution imageries are made available; they may face the masking axe (resampling to a lower resolution, duffing etc), killing the utility of the tool to a wide range of users. Another security feature of Bhuvan is the mandatory registration process. Such restrictions are clearly not conducive for the popularity and effective use of Bhuvan as today’s users of Google Earth, Virtual Earth and other such services expect and demand very high resolution imagery, though most will carry out a simple search of a particular location. If one is asked/forced to use Bhuvan, it’s like pushing a person used to business class travel into economy class!  Second wave of geographic data The first wave in the digital world of GIS was generated by Google, Microsoft etc. In India, where users have always suffered the dearth of maps and satellite data, it is the right time for Bhuvan to take credit for creating the second wave. Its users will not be the common man, but the government itself along with research and academic communities. Nothing can stop Bhuvan from serving the data, especially to the government users as the remote sensing policy clearly states that they can obtain image data at a resolution of 1 m or better ‘without any clearance’. This can create a great interest amongst a wider government audience. Apart from the current features of drought and flood monitoring, a few areas where the Bhuvan could find great usage include
To increase its usability, Bhuvan has to take a step further from just being a geo browser. A few important improvements thatBhuvan can look at are:
When we look at today’s popular Digital Earths and other geographic data initiatives like SDI and GEOSS, as they were envisioned 10 years ago, Craglia, Goodchild and Annoni speak of setting new visions for the next 5-10 years to build on the existing, to bridge gaps and to overcome limitations. A few recommendations suitable for Bhuvan could be:
If Bhuvan can work with such vision and succeed in creating a second wave in expanding geographic data usage in India amongst not just the government, research institutions and academia but also among the lay citizens, one day we might as well say, “Bhuvan is a rival of all Digital Earths”. |