Hyderabad (India), February 11, 2015: The second day of the India Geospatial Forum, thematic and technical sessions on forestry, integrated water resource management, emerging applications and trends, geobusiness and location intelligence, and remote sensing and photogrammetry witnessed packed houses.
At the emerging applications and trends, Wing Commander PK Mishra, Indian Air Force said, the aeronautical data currently available is published in tabular form as HTML or PDF documents making it difficult to interpret and visualise the information. Also, to subscribe to this data, Indian aviation companies have to pay a high subscription fee. “Aviation is an unforgiving sector; therefore, the accuracy and ease of understanding of map was the most important factors. There are two shortcomings of the currently available database: interoperability and updatability,” he said. He explained how a team of GIS professional have taken over the task to prepare indigenous aeronautical database and charts the using COTS tools and software.
Another emerging technology that drew lot of attention was Mapcode, which is a short-code consisting of numbers and alphabets separated by a dot intrigued the delegates. Explaining why Mapcode was conceived, Kewal Shienmar, managing director, Mapcode Foundation said, “Less than 50% of the dwellings on earth has an address, and even those which have an address are not based on a standard pattern.” Mapcode uses an open source algorithm based on a grid system to divide the world into latitude and longitudes and assigns a shortcode that pinpoints a region with an accuracy of 5m.
Speaking at the thematic session on forestry, Dr HC Mishra, APCCF (IT), Andhra Pradesh Forest Department informed delegates that around 80%of the requirements of wood-based industries in India are met from trees outside the forest. Dr Mishra spoke on how Andhra Pradesh Forest Department is assessing trees outside forest using CARTOSAT-1 data of 2.5 metres resolution for the first time in the country.
In another session, Jella Kiran from Telangana Remote Sensing Application Centre deliberated on Telangana state has implemented a GIS based planning and expansion of drinking water distribution system programme.
In addition to the thematic and technical session two co-located events — GeoBuild Smart Infrastructure 2015 and The Youth Forum— also saw experts confabulate on the emerging trends. As India is gearing up to be the country with the largest number of millennial, young and bright students various reputed universities in India who presented papers and showcased applications based on geospatial data at The Youth Forum and grabbed the limelight. The GeoBuild Smart Infrastructure 2015 conclave saw experts from various parts of the country discussing how cities can be made “smarter” using technology.
In the evening, a closed door discussion was held between 11 Mayors and the geospatial industry stakeholders in which ideas were exchanged on how to incorporate geospatial tools right from the planning to asset management stage of a city.
Source: Our correspondent
