 Prof. Arup Dasgupta Honorary Managing Editor [email protected] |
January was an important month for GIS Development. We came out with our 150th issue and we held our flagship event, Map India 2010. The theme of the event was “Defining a Geospatial Vision for India”. With 1200 plus delegates, 28 countries and 41 exhibitors, clearly the vision was full of promise; and why not? While on the one hand Joseph Stiglitz calls for another round of stimuli for the economy of the developed world, on the other hand India shows a seven percent growth amongst all the gloom and doom. President Obama declares that India will not wait and to protect American jobs he promises to withdraw tax reliefs to companies who take jobs out of America. All these are part of this vision which shows India’s strong growth.
There is a lesson in this for our geospatial companies that depend on work from abroad and a lesson to our lawmakers whose restrictive colonial approach to data availability is hurting the growth of the industry. Geospatial industries cannot live by selling boxes alone. They need data to be able to reach the next level of growth: value addition. The statement of the Minister of Science and Technology was both heartening and disheartening. He spelt out the futility of the present policy and promised a better one. That pronouncement gave me a distinct feeling of déjà vu.
Enough of the past; in this issue we cover an emerging and very important aspect of geospatial systems: peoples’ participation. We were pleasantly surprised by the tremendous response from authors. It clearly shows that peoples’ participation has arrived, not as a novelty but as a serious attempt to come to terms with their geospatial context. Open Street Maps showed the way; Google followed and now even established market leaders like ESRI have acknowledged the importance and value of neo-geographers. With hindsight this was only to be expected. On the one hand high resolution data from satellites require comparable fine scale data collection on the ground. The costs of such data collection are too high for any single organisation. On the other hand the common person is no longer satisfied being a passive spectator of development efforts for his benefit. He or she needs to be a part of that decision making process. Last but not least, when an event like the Haiti earthquake happens, there is just no time for a formal data gathering process. This is a situation where the efforts of neo-geographers come into focus. They can provide real time information and assist rescue and recovery efforts in a much timelier manner than formal databases. There are issues of interoperability and standardisation which need to be addressed. There is also a need for the neo-geographer to have a basic background in geography. But these are details; the future belongs to the people.
