Web portals to offer geospatial data

The Union government on Tuesday launched web portals to offer the geospatial data collected by the Survey of India and the National Atlas and Thematic Mapping Organization either free or at a nominal cost. The launch comes nearly six months after the government announced liberalisation of collection and dissemination of geospatial data, in February, allowing private companies to conduct surveying and mapping without government approvals, and to share data for various applications — from logistics and transport to road safety and e-commerce. In addition to that, the Survey of India has also developed a web geographic information system called Sarthi that will help users in creating applications for geospatial data visualisation, manipulation, and analysis without a lot of resources at their end. “The portal will allow a company or say the Maharashtra government to create an application with different types of geographical data instead of investing resources in creating such application on their own from the geospatial data available,” said Sunil Kumar, joint secretary, department of science.