Speaking on the occasion, Dr. Kapoor said that with the start of Job Alert SMS Service the Employment Exchanges of the State would intimate the unemployed youth, registered with employment exchanges about the job fairs, campus interviews and vacancies. He said that the Job Alert SMS service would prove to be time, money and labour saving initiative. He urged the youth to register their mobile numbers with their respective employment exchanges so that they could get benefit of this service.

Principal Secretary said that Alert SMS service was being started from Kangra district for the Job Fair to be held at Sports Stadium Dharamshala on 20th June, 2012 which would be inaugurated by Industry Minister Shri Kishan Kapoor. He said that in order to help the unemployed youth of the State to get jobs in private sector such job fairs were being organised in different parts of the State from time to time.

He said that more than 32 private sector employers from the industrial areas of Baddi, Barotiwala, Nalagarh, Parwanoo, Una, Paonta Sahib and Chandigarh would take job seekers for their organization from the job fair.

During a period of nine months of its coming into existence Aryabhata Geo-Informatics and Space Application Centre (AGiSAC) has developed web based Geospatial Information Systems/Decision support systems for 18 departments.

That’s coming from Sambus Geospatial, the indigenous company providing banks with the technology which serves as a credit-risk management tool.
The technology addresses banks’ longstanding challenge with poor identification and address systems to reduce their loan defaults.

Executive Director, Samuel Larbi-Darko tells JOY BUSINESS, it holds significant prospects for improving general banking operations.

“Like in terms of locating a bank branch or ATM, what is the information available for an informed decision. So if you have all this information it gives enables the bank make an good and profitable decisions” he said.

“Location is gradually becoming more like a global commodity just as Microsoft started and Microsoft Word software has now become a common platform.In the same vein, GIS is also going to become a common platform for people because we can see that people visist Google maps to see where their houses are. Except that Google maps do not give you the opportunity to interact with maps to create models and scenarios as opposed to GIS”he added.

According to the Chief Executive of UT Bank, Prince Kofi Amoabeng the technology couldn’t have come at any better time for banks but its benefits transcends the banking sector to include governance as a whole.

“The banking sector has had challenges with Non Performing Loans or bad debts which adds to the cost of doing business and thereby high interest rates. And the government is trying to address it with a number of initiatives like the Credit Referencing. The Credit Referencing Bureaus however depend on accurate information about the people and where they live” he said.

“It is crucial to know where people live and how to make them responsible and accountable. And this is not just for the banking sector but the beginning of governance. If you want to govern the people, your role is to develop the people and to do that you need to have information about them – where they live, what they own and what they produce among others and that’s what the GIS is going to do” Mr. Amoabeng explained.

Source

A recently constituted Task Force by the Karnataka Knowledge Commission (KKC) is working on establishing a Karnataka Geographic Information System (GIS) that would serve as an aid for better governance and planning.

Karnataka Knowlede Comission

The Task Force, headed by renowned GIS expert Mukund Rao, has been given three months’ time to develop a roadmap for GIS-based governance, citizen participation and business innovation.

GIS applications can serve as a powerful planning and decision making tool as it incorporates geographical features with data in order to map, analyse and assess real problems.

While Karnataka was one of the first states to establish a separate centre for remote sensing and GIS, the Karnataka State Remote Sensing Application Centre (KSRSAC), the concept needs to make inroads and be an integral part of the State governance and planning process, pointed out KKC Executive Director and Member Secretary M K Sridhar.

The roadmap prepared by the task force will institutionalise the GIS activities under a state-wide organisational focus and also take forward the existing GIS initiative in different departments, he said.

National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, Director V S Ramamurthy, K Prabhuraj, KSRSAC Director, V S Prakash, Director, Karnataka State Natural Disaster Monitoring Centre and M N Vidyashankar, Principal Secretary of the e-governance Department are the members of the panel.

The panel, at its first meeting, decided to hold extensive consultations to assess the user needs of various stakeholders including the State government, non-governmental organisations, academia, citizens and industries. Based on the needs of the stakeholders, the panel would arrive at a roadmap.

Source: Deccan Herald

And this was made possible thanks to Shelter Associates, an NGO that has been using the GIS and remote sensing technology for mapping poverty since1999.

Today, the NGO is busy with slum rehabilitation in Sangli with a city-wide approach and in a technologically advanced and efficient manner.

The Google Earth images are being used as a base map for digitizing slum boundaries. The map and information on the slums is incorporated on GIS and a detailed factsheet of each slum is compiled.

“Through these images, the slum dwellers could see how their slums are spread and how far they are located from several amenities such as schools, hospitals, market and station. Thus, the relocation has been planned within 2 to 2.5 kms from their current location,” said Pratima Joshi, director, Shelter Associates. The construction of the new houses have just begun and is expected to be completed by 2014. Each house will cost around Rs 2.5 lakh.

In 2009, Shelter Associates was appointed as a consultant to submit a proposal to the Government of India under the Housing and Slum Development Programmes (IHSDP) scheme for the rehabilitation of Sangli’s slum population, covering 29 slums across the city, into an integrated housing and infrastructure scheme.

Source: Indian Express

This landmark finding by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory may have significant impact on India’s renewable energy strategy as it attempts to cope with a massive and chronic shortage of electricity.

The Berkeley Lab study undertook a systematic assessment of the availability of land using publicly available GIS (geographic information system) data on topography and land use and found a significantly higher availability of land that can potentially be used for wind power development, which is the primary reason for the higher potential estimates.

The study excluded land with low-quality wind, slopes greater than 20 degrees, elevation greater than 1,500 meters and certain other unsuitable areas such as forests, bodies of water and cities.

The researchers obtained off-the-shelf wind speed data for heights of 80 meters, 100 meters and 120 meters from 3TIER.

Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon are the key vendors dominating the current market space.

The global remote sensing technology market has also been witnessing advancement in aerial remote sensing technology. However, inconsistent, or highly variable, governmental policies could pose a challenge to the growth of this market, according to Research and Markets.

According to the report, data users are appraising the replacement of multispectral data with hyper spectral data.

The report suggests that growth will be seen in the key areas of hyperspectral, SAR, and LIDAR for aircraft, especially as sensor systems develop the capability to provide low-cost, broad area coverage. Hyperspectral sensor systems in advancement will offer automated feature detection, identification and classification. Diverse markets, such as defense, agriculture and forestry, all benefit from the change in detection technology.

“There is an evident transition, in aerial remote sensing, to digital sensor technologies, which are capable of elevation collection and direct geo-registration. This transition has resulted in new markets for infrastructure inventory and analysis, and urban mapping. During the past few years, sensor technologies are becoming more and more diverse. Digital aerial cameras that come with inertial measurement and on-board GPS provide easy access to geo-located information. This will assist in opening up new markets, especially where pricing has limited acceptance of remotely sensed information,” said an analyst from TechNavio’s Enterprise Applications team.

Source: Telecomlead

This is where the use of GIS comes in.

Using GIS allows organisations to go beyond making maps of just land cover. It enables them to combine layers of information, and study the spatial relationship between selected indicators to get a more holistic view of places or regions they are working to develop.

At present, these organisations are using GIS in missions to collect data about the in-country projects they fund across all sectors. The resulting mission portfolio databases are most often used to generate maps of their projects to visualise their respective location, track progress, and communicate what is going on and where. This is quite similar to how an organisation such as the World Food Program (WFP) uses its GIS during its disaster response and recovery operations.

According to Syed Fawad Raza, Program Officer and Spatial Analyst at the World Food Program in Pakistan, the agency leverages GIS for food security analysis to target which areas are hotspots and food-deprived. Based on its research and through studying the spatial relationships of variables involved, it is then able to plan intervention in affected areas.

“GIS plays a very crucial role in supporting WFP’s mandate in helping communities cope with the effects of calamities or disasters, and also in helping those affected communities stand up again and rebuild their lives. That’s how our cycle works and of course mapping is central to monitoring and evaluation, identifying areas, gaps, crucial hot spots, and where to go,” he said.

In other cases, GIS is being used as a component of a larger program to address a specific development challenge.

In Uganda for example, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) involved local villagers in participatory mapping as part of a biodiversity conservation project to reduce human-wildlife conflicts. The maps produced by the community were compared to the district government’s land use boundaries, and helped resolve the conflict about rights to land resources.

At a regional level, the Central African Regional Program for the Environment uses satellite imagery to map forests and monitor changes due to logging. Information derived is then shared with the governments of nine countries spanning the catchment basic of the Congo river.

At a Global level, USAID supports a global program called the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which aims to establish a repository that would then provide geographically-linked HIV-related data for mapping in a GIS. In addition, USAID is also collaborating with NASA in a program called SERVIR (which means “to serve” in Spanish), which aims to build the capacity of countries in the Mesoamerican, East African, and the Hindu-kush Himalayan regions to use remote sensing, mapping tools, and geo-visualisation to address climate change and other environmental issues.

More than a decade ago, world leaders gathered together at the United Nations Millennium Summit to pledge the achievement of eight development goals by 2015.

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Source: FutureGov

For over 2500 years, people have been fascinated by geography, the study of our planet, its places, its processes, and its people. I argue that geography can be thought of as a three-legged stool.  The first leg is a rich body of content, including an understanding of river systems, biomes, climate, ocean currents, regional characteristics, natural hazards, energy, migration, and demographics, just to name a few.  These are not just facts about those topics, but an in-depth examination about how they work and how they change over space and time.  The second leg is composed of the skills that are inherent to geography, such as critical thinking skills, analytical skills, and problem-solving skills.  Other skills include working with maps, satellite images, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Global Positioning Systems (GPS), databases, scales, processes, spatial and temporal relationships, representing data, and other key skills necessary for the 21st Century.  The third leg is the geographic, or spatial, perspective.  This perspective is needed now more than ever, as our world becomes more populated, more complex, and more interconnected.  The geographically-informed person sees the world from the viewpoint that phenomena interact and change over space, at local, regional, and global scales, and the resulting spatial relationships are important in nearly every aspect of our physical and cultural environment.

Today, geography is more relevant than ever, as issues such as climate change, biodiversity loss, sustainable agriculture, water quality and quantity, political instability, food, transportation, energy, and natural hazards grow in importance at the global scale but also increasingly affect our everyday lives.  To effectively grapple with these complex issues, decision-makers need to see and understand geographic patterns and trends at anything from a global scale down to the level of a local community.  To investigate such trends, geographers, and increasingly those outside of geography, rely on GIS (Gewin 2004).  Unlike traditional maps, GIS goes beyond static, two-dimensional objects: instead, individual maps can be manipulated and combined with other maps, charts, databases, and multimedia, some in 3-D space.

The “G” in GIS represents geography – the map.  The map could be a 2-D or 3-D topographic map, a map of soil pH, ecosystems, or watersheds, or a satellite image.  The “I” represents the information behind the map, stored in a database. For rivers, the information could indicate perennial or intermittent, streamflow rate, or how conductivity or salinity varies with time or along its course.   The ‘S” – the system – connects the map and the database. By selecting components on the map, the GIS analyst simultaneously selects the associated attributes in the database (and vice versa), allowing them to changed, visualized, or classified.   With the help of hundreds of tools in a GIS, spatial data can be manipulated and combined in many different ways.  For example, the proximity tool could find all of the earthquakes that have occurred within 100 km of Charleroi, and the overlay tool could narrow down these earthquakes to those that have occurred under alluvium as the surficial deposit and that are on land containing high density residential development.

Using GIS in Education

Why should GIS professionals who read the GIS User care about geography and GIS education?  To build the workforce that GIS organizations are seeking when they hire people, education is an obviously critical component.  In primary, secondary, university, and informal education, GIS can be used to help students think critically, use real data, and solve problems.  It appeals to today’s visual and technology-based learners.  GIS is as fundamental a tool for teaching and learning geography as the periodic table of the elements is to a chemistry instructor or a microscope to a biology instructor.  However, GIS can and must be used beyond geography to biology, chemistry, earth science, environmental science, history, mathematics, and in other subjects. Why?  If the GIS community believes that GIS should be a core tool used in all disciplines, we must insist that GIS be embedded in these disciplines, beginning as early in the educational system as possible.  In addition, GIS can be effectively used in combination with outdoor education (Louv 2005) and provides excellent career pathways for students.  A wide variety of topics can be explored, such as the relationships between people, climate, land use, vegetation, river systems, aquifers, landforms, soils, and natural hazards.  GIS inquiry begins with asking a geographic question.  For example, how will climate change affect global food production? What is the relationship between birth rate and life expectancy? How does acid mine drainage in a mountain range affect water quality downstream? How does the changing demography associated with smaller household size affect urban sprawl? What is the best location for new wind energy farms? How will a proposed retail center affect community traffic patterns and land use?

In the classroom, GIS can be used in numerous ways (Kerski 2008).    Using GIS tools such as ArcGIS (http://www.esri.com/arcgis) or ArcGIS Online (http://www.arcgis.com) and searching on “hurricane,” students can analyse the route, severity, and frequency of hurricanes and cyclones in the western Atlantic Ocean for the past 150 years.  Are hurricanes becoming more or less frequent today than they were during the 19th or 20th Centuries?  Students can gather data on tree location, height, and species on their school campus using GPS receivers or even smartphones, build a spreadsheet, and then map those trees on top of a satellite image base map to analyze the pattern.  Students can analyze the effects of the October 2010 toxic flood in Hungary on downstream communities and rivers (http://edcommunity.esri.com/arclessons/lesson.cfm?id=556).  Students can access the “This Dynamic Planet” map (http://mineralsciences.si.edu/tdpmap/) to study the relationship of earthquakes and volcanoes to plate boundaries and the rate of plate movement.

Students can use Worldmapper (http://www.worldmapper.org) to analyse over 750 variables such as high-tech exports, forest loss, and mineral extraction as cartograms and spreadsheets.  Through the use of ArcGIS, students can analyse the flood potential for rivers in their community and current wildfires around the world using real data and base maps in two or three dimensions. They can determine the mean center of population for an area, analyze how forests have changed in Brazil by analyzing satellite images from the 1970s to today, or determine how many cities in the USA are within 25 km of the coast.  Many other examples of using GIS in education exist, but let us select two and explore them in greater detail.

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Source: GIS User