Users demand v/s Survey of India Strategies on Geo Information Management

Abstract

Users demand v/s Survey of India Strategies on Geo Information Management

P.K.Das
Superintending Surveyor
Survey of India,
Email: pkdsti@yahoo.co.in

Geo-information plays a vital role for the economic development of a country. Providing Geo-Information means chaining Geo-information providers, data value adders and GI users in the society. Survey of India, the authorized GI-providers of the country, is now under pressure to meet the user’s requirements in the market. The various users of GI products are District collectors, tahasildars, municipalities, utility companies, e-government, e-commerce departments, cadastre, urban planners, farmers, villagers, slum dwellers and many more. They want large scale data with good qualities. The completeness, the positional accuracy, the attribute accuracy, currency, organization of data, the consistency, free from heterogeneity problem, and temporal information are some of the data qualities required for them. This requires data must be interoperable horizontally (across different thematic database) and vertically (from local to national level), may be documented with adequate metadata, technical characteristics need to be guaranteed and datasets should cover a complete jurisdiction as per user’s requirement.

To meet the customers demand a situation analysis was carried out for SOI (based upon a SWOT analysis) for the information requirement and of the critical success factors in terms of activities to be undertaken, had lead to the definition of a business strategy and technology strategy. In business strategy it was proposed to have an Advisory Board to frame policies. The policy frame work should cover specific issues concerning the various types of data to be collected, data communication and quality standards, marketing, pricing and sale of products, fee structure, data access, use and distribution. Other policy matter includes data ownership, data integrity, security, and control.

In technology strategy total quality management care may be taken for feature extraction, creation of DEM, Orthophoto generation, metadata creation, creation of DTDB, and data dissemination. In technical aspects SOI may use various standards like (UML for modelling), exchanging structured information (XML) and geo-information standards (Open GIS simple features, web map server, GML etc.). It is also proposed to have data collection with public private partnership (PPP) which may give a good competition. Some organizations are producing topographic data usually at high resolution and specific geographic area for their particular GIS application. Integrating this data into a common topographic base will increase availability of topographic data at national level and also avoid duplication of efforts.

In technology strategy total quality management care may be taken for feature extraction, creation of DEM, Orthophoto generation, metadata creation, creation of DTDB, and data dissemination. In technical aspects SOI may use various standards like (UML for modelling), exchanging structured information (XML) and geo-information standards (Open GIS simple features, web map server, GML etc.). It is also proposed to have data collection with public private partnership (PPP) which may give a good competition. Some organizations are producing topographic data usually at high resolution and specific geographic area for their particular GIS application. Integrating this data into a common topographic base will increase availability of topographic data at national level and also avoid duplication of efforts.