Geoportal To Give Kerala Spatial Data Edge

‘Time is money’ and ‘A penny saved is a penny earned’ are the two proverbs around which the survival strategies of businesses are built. The government of Kerala seems to have realised well the importance of both time and money. With the proposal to build a Spatial Data Infrastructure – a Rs 937 lakh project – it is making sure that companies that come to the state of Kerala save both.

If a company wanted to set up a branch in a certain location, what is the kind of information that it would require? Infrastructure availability, facilities near or around the location, the culture of the region, so on and so forth. To amass information of this kind, it will not only take a lot of money but time as well.

“With the availability of the geoportal, the availability of spatial (geographical) data related to different domains such as infrastructure, traffic planning, resource availability, demographic status, socio-economic status, health and culture, etc, will be available within the click of a mouse even up to the cadastral scale,” says Dr Ajay Kumar, IT Secretary, government of Kerala. Thus, the business community can have a better understanding of their respective areas of interest. The purpose of KSDI is to create, maintain and deliver geospatial data and metadata in real-time and independently from the software used.

The Need for a State-Level Infrastructure

The government of India has established a national facility known as the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) for the purposes of acquiring, processing, storing, distributing and improving the utilisation of spatial data being generated by various government agencies. In line with the NSDI, the Kerala government has geared up its activities to set up a State Spatial Data Infrastructure (SSDI) to co-ordinate the activities of the state.

Talking about the need for such a facility in the state, Kumar says, “Geo-spatial data is a mainstay for a wide variety of applications and decision making. In Kerala, several organisations have been generating spatial data for the past two or three decades. However, this has resulted in enormous duplication of work, which could have been avoided if there was a proper mechanism to monitor all the efforts.” He further adds that spatial data acquired/ developed by different agencies is currently not in an interoperable format, which restricts its usage by other agencies.

“No data catalogue is available, thus, we do not know which organisation has what data. Due to the unavailability of metadata in a centralised platform, it is difficult for users to know about the quality of the data and ways and means to access the available data,” adds Kumar. He further states that there is no mechanism for users to access the available data from different sources according to their requirements. The available and accessible data cannot be used in conjunction with others, as different organisations follow multiplicity of standards in terms of scale, projection, standard, content, formats and quality. Even if the data gets standardised, there may be a reluctance to share among organisations or restrictive policies may be at work.

To avoid these issues, a single standard has to be specified and all available data has to be converted into an interoperable format. This was the inspiration behind the setting up of this facility. This portal will be built to operate as a starting point and frequent gateway to access Web resources and geospatial data content. The geoportal, thus developed, must have capability to handle data storage, retrieval and updates. It has to also support automatic and manual form based input/ update of metadata using required services.

The Technology at Work

“Clearing House is a decentralised system of servers located on the Internet that contains descriptions of available digital geo-spatial data. This descriptive information, known as metadata, is collected in a standard format to facilitate query and consistent presentation across multiple participating sites,” says Kumar.

He further adds that the proposed Web-based geo-portal will be developed using a Web-based server, based on OGC/ ISO standards. Once all the data is published to the server by the data providers, then various clients would be able to view the data and would be allowed to download the required data or be able to perform various spatial and non-spatial functions and analysis on the data through the KSDI. All that a user would need is a Web browser and a network connection. Only authorised/ registered staff will have access to the server application/ database.

Challenges before the Victory

George S Patton said, ‘Accept challenges, so that you may feel the exhilaration of victory’. So, what are the challenges that the Kerala government expects to be faced with, before it feels the exhilaration of victory? “The spatial data acquired/ developed by different agencies is not in an interoperable format as they differ in projection system, datum, co-ordinate system, file formats etc. Even if the spatial datasets developed by different agencies follow the same standard, they are not consistent with each other,” says Kumar.

He further explains that overlaying one layer of data over another may indicate significant differences. Inconsistency in layers, especially for layers such as administrative boundaries, creates significant issues in large scale projects in which data from different sources has to be used together.
“Conversion of the digital data collected over the past three decades into a globally acceptable, OGC-compliant format is the real challenge,” says Kumar.

The Brighter Side

However, there is a silver lining in this as well. At the moment, the market for spatial data and information is undergoing major changes, with Internet and e-commerce having become strong business drivers. “The launching of new satellites and advancements in computing technologies have made significant contribution in the availability of spatial data. With the availability of high-resolution satellite data (0.5 m resolution), its utilisation for local level planning, especially urban planning, infrastructure planning, land use planning etc, becomes easier,” says Kumar.

This infrastructure will help the government in a number of other operations including micro-level developmental planning. “In KSDI, it is proposed to develop various decision support systems for natural hazard management, e-governance, traffic management, land management etc. In fact, the domain of applications for spatial data is ever expanding,” concludes Kumar.