Indian |
International | Geographic Information Infrastructure
ICIMOD's Approach Towards a Regional Geo-Information Infrastructure (RGII) in the Hindu-Kush Himlayan (HKH) Region Capacity building As discussed earlier, MENRIS put major efforts in capacity building from its beginning. It still believes that qualified and capable human resource is the fundamental component of a RGII. 
Fig 3: MENRIS Training CD ROM Through its training and support activities over the last decade, many national institutes in the region have become self sufficient in the use of GIS technology. Many of these institutions now have GIS programmes supported by other donors or resources. At this stage, MENRIS has redirected its capacity building activities towards universities and schools. By entering into these academic sectors, it hopes that the efforts will have multiplier effect. With GIS becoming a part of academic curricula, the future generation of the region will have better understanding of the technology and therefore its better adoption in all the fields can be hoped in the coming years. 
Fig 4: GIS for Beginners As an initiation, MENRIS has come up with a computer based training CD on "Applications of GIS and Remote Sensing to Sustainable Mountain Development" (figure 3). This CD contains concepts on the technology, interactive hands on exercises, and supplementary materials to the trainer, all packaged in an Internet compliant format. The CD can be used as a self-learning kit, or as an aid in the professional level training programmes. On the occasion of the GIS day 2000 celebrations, MENRIS released the manuscript of a book "GIS for Beginners", specially targeted to the schools. The book is under the process for mass publication. Facilitation for data exchange Spatial Framework One of the major difficulties in using the existing data is that they are in different reference systems and have inadequate information about the projection systems adopted. A spatial reference system covering the whole region and the parameters to convert the national coordinate systems to this system has become very much needed. Besides, there are problems in integrating the socioeconomic data with the biophysical data due to the different spatial units adopted for data collection. Administrative boundaries are used as basic spatial units for socioeconomic database whereas the natural geo-hydrological processes follow the watershed boundaries. It has difficult even for ICIMOD to demarcate its mandated area which is partly based on the natural boundaries and partly on administrative units. Therefore, many times there are data gaps. MENRIS is working to come up with some sort of a spatial framework where there will be a consistent framework for data acquisition and aggregation. Some initial thoughts have been put forward in one of its CD ROM release titled "Spatial Framework for HKH Region: A micro-to-macro perspective". The CD-ROM depicts the various data at ICIMOD collected at different times, different scales and different levels, and tries to put them in a common reference. The varying degree of information content and their applicability is presented. However, more research is needed to come up with a scientific, practical and agreeable framework for the whole region. Metadata Server A substantial amount of geographic information on the Himalayan region has been compiled by many institutions, development co-operation projects, and individual researchers. Most of it exists in analogue form, but there are also a growing number of institutions and projects using GIS facilities to compile their own databases. 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 attempts to take a lead role to provide metadata services to the user community in- and outside the region. MENRIS has already started working on the development of a metadata system. After going through the different standards and the requirements of ICIMOD, and in view of its institutional affiliations with UNEP/GRID, it has decided to adopt NASA's Directory Interchange Format (DIF) 'standard' for metadata with some additional information. A system has been designed to publish the metadata report both in the DIF format and the modified format. MENRIS is in the process of documenting all its database in this format. Work is going on to add a spatial search engine to this system and make it Internet compliant using Map Objects and Map Objects Internet Map Server. Once the system is in place, it is planned to disseminate this system to the partner institutions so that their data can also be documented in the same format. |