I just had to share this wonderfully imaginative piece of science fiction from xkcd comics.
Using map projections to alter our perception of geography is an old trick.
Showing posts with label GIS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label GIS. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 9, 2022
Thursday, March 7, 2013
Florida Sinkholes Also Pose A More Subtle Danger
Last week, a fatality, as the ground gave way under a Tampa Bay area home. However, the more common concern regarding sinkholes is their connection to groundwater quality. Despite its reputation as a great tourist destination, Florida is also a major agricultural state. The soil is reenforced with fertilizers, and crops are sprayed extensively with pesticides. Environmental managers worry that these chemicals might find their way into groundwater.
This concern is not unique to Florida but is amplified due to the presence of karst topography. Extensive limestone formations underlie Florida. Limestone reacts with the weakly acidic groundwater and over the last few million years these limestone beds have dissolved away in varying degree to create an underground network of caves and pipes. The overlying strata may bear its own weight for long periods depending on how thick it is and how porous the underground limestone has become, but occasionally the cover collapses into the underlying cavity forming surface craters or sinkholes.
Fatalities are rare, but sinkhole formation is quite common over geological time. The map below shows an area just east of Gainsville.
Notice the circular and irregular shaped lakes. Most of them are sinkholes now filled with water. This surface water makes its way through fractures and pipes into the underlying limestone which make up the Floridan aquifer system. Sinkholes thus provide a direct and quick connection for potential pollutants to contaminate groundwater which is the main source of drinking water in Florida.
This concern is not unique to Florida but is amplified due to the presence of karst topography. Extensive limestone formations underlie Florida. Limestone reacts with the weakly acidic groundwater and over the last few million years these limestone beds have dissolved away in varying degree to create an underground network of caves and pipes. The overlying strata may bear its own weight for long periods depending on how thick it is and how porous the underground limestone has become, but occasionally the cover collapses into the underlying cavity forming surface craters or sinkholes.
Fatalities are rare, but sinkhole formation is quite common over geological time. The map below shows an area just east of Gainsville.
Notice the circular and irregular shaped lakes. Most of them are sinkholes now filled with water. This surface water makes its way through fractures and pipes into the underlying limestone which make up the Floridan aquifer system. Sinkholes thus provide a direct and quick connection for potential pollutants to contaminate groundwater which is the main source of drinking water in Florida.
Monday, October 8, 2012
The Most Divisive Maps In America
More on the art and science of map making. This time it is Robert Draper in The Atlantic writing about the history and politics of gerrymandering:
....as works of art, redistricting maps continue to evoke a crazed but symbolically rich dreamscape of yearnings, sentimentality, vendettas, and hyper-realism in American political life. Districts weave this way and that to include a Congress member’s childhood school, a mother-in-law’s residence, a wealthy donor’s office, or, out of spite, an adversary’s pet project. When touring Republican strongholds, Tom Hofeller enjoys showing audiences the contours of Georgia’s 13th District, as proposed after the 2010 census, which he likens to “flat-cat roadkill.” (The map that was ultimately approved is shaped more like a squirrel that hasn’t yet been hit by a car.) This redistricting cycle’s focus of wonderment, in Hofeller’s view, is Maryland’s splatter-art 3rd District, which reminds him of an “amoeba convention.” He tends not to mention the gimpy-legged facsimile that is his own rendition of North Carolina’s 4th District.
My speciality, Geographic Information Systems plays a role too:
“There’s an old saying: Give a child a hammer, and the world becomes a nail. Give the chairman of a state redistricting committee a powerful enough computer and block-level census data, so that he suddenly discovers he can draw really weird and aggressive districts—and he will.”
Fascinating article..
....as works of art, redistricting maps continue to evoke a crazed but symbolically rich dreamscape of yearnings, sentimentality, vendettas, and hyper-realism in American political life. Districts weave this way and that to include a Congress member’s childhood school, a mother-in-law’s residence, a wealthy donor’s office, or, out of spite, an adversary’s pet project. When touring Republican strongholds, Tom Hofeller enjoys showing audiences the contours of Georgia’s 13th District, as proposed after the 2010 census, which he likens to “flat-cat roadkill.” (The map that was ultimately approved is shaped more like a squirrel that hasn’t yet been hit by a car.) This redistricting cycle’s focus of wonderment, in Hofeller’s view, is Maryland’s splatter-art 3rd District, which reminds him of an “amoeba convention.” He tends not to mention the gimpy-legged facsimile that is his own rendition of North Carolina’s 4th District.
My speciality, Geographic Information Systems plays a role too:
“There’s an old saying: Give a child a hammer, and the world becomes a nail. Give the chairman of a state redistricting committee a powerful enough computer and block-level census data, so that he suddenly discovers he can draw really weird and aggressive districts—and he will.”
Fascinating article..
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Bhuvan Continues To Be A Mixed Bag As A Citizen Mapping Tool
After my last post on the use of Google Earth to identify illegal mining in Goa, I was curious to find out if I could replicate the same in Bhuvan, India's public mapping portal.
I was disappointed:
1) There is no historical imagery available, or at least none that I could find. So I could not pull out older imagery to verify claims made about the presence /absence of mining before a certain date. This is not due to a lack of older imagery. The Indian Space Research Organization has had a remote sensing satellite program since the late 1980's and imagery of at least 23 m resolution is available for the last couple of decades and imagery of 5.8 meter resolution is available for the last 12 years or so (IRS - 1D). The 5.8 m resolution images are fine grained enough to identify large features like open pit mines.
2) I could not find the open pit mines using "search by name". In Google Earth I could zoom onto the area of the open pit mines by searching for the nearest settlement "Maina" which was mentioned in the article on the Goa mining scam by the newspaper Herald. In Bhuvan, the search by name database works best for towns and cities. The village level data is still incomplete. Even when a small village is present in the database the imagery does not always zoom to that area, nor is the village annotated to allow easy navigation to it. These are the basics of interactive map navigation design and Bhuvan is falling short.
On a general note, its been close to three months since the government announced that 1 meter resolution data will now be available without need for security clearances. Yet Bhuvan still is not streaming imagery finer than 5.8 meter resolution.
On the data download front, elevation data of CartoDEM 1 arc second (Digital Elevation Model derived from Cartosat 1 imagery- 1 arc second corresponds to roughly 30 meters) and Resourcesat-1: AWiFS imagery (56m) of the Indian region can be downloaded from the NRSC Open EO Data Archive. You can choose the product and the area of interest from the Bhuvan interface. The DEM download is a welcome addition. You could previously download 1 km resolution DEM of India from the USGS and also 30 m relative DEM generated from the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) from NASA.
However, regarding imagery the government's all too cautious approach is perplexing. If 5.8 meter resolution and 1 meter resolution data are available and now cleared for access to all users without further security checks, why not let users download that data too?
I was disappointed:
1) There is no historical imagery available, or at least none that I could find. So I could not pull out older imagery to verify claims made about the presence /absence of mining before a certain date. This is not due to a lack of older imagery. The Indian Space Research Organization has had a remote sensing satellite program since the late 1980's and imagery of at least 23 m resolution is available for the last couple of decades and imagery of 5.8 meter resolution is available for the last 12 years or so (IRS - 1D). The 5.8 m resolution images are fine grained enough to identify large features like open pit mines.
2) I could not find the open pit mines using "search by name". In Google Earth I could zoom onto the area of the open pit mines by searching for the nearest settlement "Maina" which was mentioned in the article on the Goa mining scam by the newspaper Herald. In Bhuvan, the search by name database works best for towns and cities. The village level data is still incomplete. Even when a small village is present in the database the imagery does not always zoom to that area, nor is the village annotated to allow easy navigation to it. These are the basics of interactive map navigation design and Bhuvan is falling short.
On a general note, its been close to three months since the government announced that 1 meter resolution data will now be available without need for security clearances. Yet Bhuvan still is not streaming imagery finer than 5.8 meter resolution.
On the data download front, elevation data of CartoDEM 1 arc second (Digital Elevation Model derived from Cartosat 1 imagery- 1 arc second corresponds to roughly 30 meters) and Resourcesat-1: AWiFS imagery (56m) of the Indian region can be downloaded from the NRSC Open EO Data Archive. You can choose the product and the area of interest from the Bhuvan interface. The DEM download is a welcome addition. You could previously download 1 km resolution DEM of India from the USGS and also 30 m relative DEM generated from the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) from NASA.
However, regarding imagery the government's all too cautious approach is perplexing. If 5.8 meter resolution and 1 meter resolution data are available and now cleared for access to all users without further security checks, why not let users download that data too?
Thursday, October 6, 2011
Online Interactive Geological Map Of India
I keep tabs on the India Biodiversity Portal, one of the best India based open access web mapping applications focusing on natural resources.
They have online now an interactive geological layer created by digitizing likely 1 : 1 million scale Geological Survey Of India geology maps. The contributor is R. Ravindranath of the Foundation of Ecological Security. You can click on geological units and get a description of the unit. You can also thematically style the geology based on Geological Age and Lithology. And you can control transparency so as to get an idea of the relationship between say physiography and geology. The physiography layer is one of the Google base layers available for display.
Other geology related overlay layers are India Aquifers, India Soils, India Geomorphology and India River Basins. I wish they had different display styles like transparent cross hatch, dots, symbols and lines and so on to choose from to enable easy visualization of multiple themes but perhaps that is something for the future. Unfortunately none of these geology layers are available as downloads. Government owned vector data is still not being distributed freely in digital format. I hope there is a change in policy on that soon.
But this is an important and growing resource for geology and biodiversity data. You can register and contribute layers to the natural resources database. Most Layers not under government control are downloadable (as shape files, GML and text) but contributors are free to choose the level of restrictions they want under a Creative Commons license.
They have online now an interactive geological layer created by digitizing likely 1 : 1 million scale Geological Survey Of India geology maps. The contributor is R. Ravindranath of the Foundation of Ecological Security. You can click on geological units and get a description of the unit. You can also thematically style the geology based on Geological Age and Lithology. And you can control transparency so as to get an idea of the relationship between say physiography and geology. The physiography layer is one of the Google base layers available for display.
Other geology related overlay layers are India Aquifers, India Soils, India Geomorphology and India River Basins. I wish they had different display styles like transparent cross hatch, dots, symbols and lines and so on to choose from to enable easy visualization of multiple themes but perhaps that is something for the future. Unfortunately none of these geology layers are available as downloads. Government owned vector data is still not being distributed freely in digital format. I hope there is a change in policy on that soon.
But this is an important and growing resource for geology and biodiversity data. You can register and contribute layers to the natural resources database. Most Layers not under government control are downloadable (as shape files, GML and text) but contributors are free to choose the level of restrictions they want under a Creative Commons license.
Monday, September 12, 2011
Data Problems In The Indian Geospatial Industry
Geospatial World has several articles (1, 2, 3 ) on the current state of the Indian Geospatial Industry. As I have been writing on this blog, there have been several initiatives taken by the Indian government to encourage growth of this industry. Of primary concern to users is the unavailability or slow availability of useful data.
Aditi Bahn Assistant Editor, Geospatial Media and Communications Pvt. Ltd. writes:
There is no single window where all the information can be obtained. For example, if a user requires information about topography and demography of a place, he has to approach Survey of India and Census of India respectively. The two have their own procedures in place and would provide data in their own time frame. She quotes industry specialists :
“The overhanging issue is the availability of data under one umbrella. Information is scattered and varied and have to be collated very frequently. It has become extremely challenging,” explains Aiyer.
..and (Mr. Agarwalla) - “Even before we talk about public-private partnership, we need to talk about public-public partnership. For most of my users, just the map or census data by itself is not good enough. So can Survey of India and Census of India partner together?”
That is not unusual. Having data in two or several different places need not by itself be a big problem. Even in countries where spatial data is relatively freely available like the U.S, many state agencies and federal agencies have ownership of their data. Finding it though is easier by going to a central data listing like the one maintained by the U.S. National Spatial Data Infrastructure. Most government agencies who produce spatial data are registered with their NSDI and follow agreed upon data standards and data dissemination practices.
In fact it is inevitable that various central and state agencies responsible for the data will want to keep ownership of it. The Indian National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) was meant to deal with exactly this problem by issuing guidelines and standards for data creation, data storage formats and data access thereby enabling users to find and combine data from different agencies with ease. The important challenge is not whether different agencies can partner each other, but getting agencies to follow standard practices in a time bound manner. The NSDI portal would then list agency addresses to go to for your data needs.
I remember talking to a senior geologist with the Geological Survey of India in 2004. I was told that digitization of 1:1 million scale geological maps is almost done and work is going on the 1:250K and selected 1:50k series. Most of this data would be ready to go online by 2006. Five years since this self-proclaimed deadline, there is still no easy way to access geology digital data.
Why has the NSDI not been successful in getting organizations to cooperate in a timely manner?
Aditi Bahn Assistant Editor, Geospatial Media and Communications Pvt. Ltd. writes:
There is no single window where all the information can be obtained. For example, if a user requires information about topography and demography of a place, he has to approach Survey of India and Census of India respectively. The two have their own procedures in place and would provide data in their own time frame. She quotes industry specialists :
“The overhanging issue is the availability of data under one umbrella. Information is scattered and varied and have to be collated very frequently. It has become extremely challenging,” explains Aiyer.
..and (Mr. Agarwalla) - “Even before we talk about public-private partnership, we need to talk about public-public partnership. For most of my users, just the map or census data by itself is not good enough. So can Survey of India and Census of India partner together?”
That is not unusual. Having data in two or several different places need not by itself be a big problem. Even in countries where spatial data is relatively freely available like the U.S, many state agencies and federal agencies have ownership of their data. Finding it though is easier by going to a central data listing like the one maintained by the U.S. National Spatial Data Infrastructure. Most government agencies who produce spatial data are registered with their NSDI and follow agreed upon data standards and data dissemination practices.
In fact it is inevitable that various central and state agencies responsible for the data will want to keep ownership of it. The Indian National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) was meant to deal with exactly this problem by issuing guidelines and standards for data creation, data storage formats and data access thereby enabling users to find and combine data from different agencies with ease. The important challenge is not whether different agencies can partner each other, but getting agencies to follow standard practices in a time bound manner. The NSDI portal would then list agency addresses to go to for your data needs.
I remember talking to a senior geologist with the Geological Survey of India in 2004. I was told that digitization of 1:1 million scale geological maps is almost done and work is going on the 1:250K and selected 1:50k series. Most of this data would be ready to go online by 2006. Five years since this self-proclaimed deadline, there is still no easy way to access geology digital data.
Why has the NSDI not been successful in getting organizations to cooperate in a timely manner?
Saturday, July 2, 2011
Mapping India: Another National GIS Effort Launched
From a trickle to a flood; the number of government backed initiatives to develop map based applications intended to reach and involve citizens to help manage India's natural and urban resources have increased over the last decade.
The latest as reported by the Economic Times is the National GIS, what appears to be a massive effort to standardize available spatial data and build resource management applications, served out over the web to different users.
I don't have enough details to comment on the particulars, but some thoughts -
The effort is touted as something of a brand new venture, although I suspect that existing applications and ongoing efforts will be grafted onto this new entity. For example, Bhoosampada (new link) allows users to browse and search for landuse and landcover data. And the National Urban GIS Mapping Mission which has promised to build standardized urban data sets is supposed to be underway to map urban areas and develop applications to aid urban governance.
My hope is that the new National GIS is not a massive duplication of efforts and that these older intiatives with some improvements will be brought within a wider umbrella effort.
There is going to a citizen layer in this application which will allow citizens to geo-tag their complaints. The principle is admirable but better governance is more hostage to a mindset than it is to technology. Today, I can either email or call or put up a status on the Pune Municipal Corporation or Pune Traffic Facebook page about a particular grievience, but the response rate is abysmal. Unless a method of personal accountability is tied up with the complaint workflow, I don't see how the citizen layer will lead to a better government -citizen partnership.
Still, it is something of a wonder that more and more government data locked up previously is making its way into the public domain. ...slowly..but that counts for progress nevertheless.
The latest as reported by the Economic Times is the National GIS, what appears to be a massive effort to standardize available spatial data and build resource management applications, served out over the web to different users.
I don't have enough details to comment on the particulars, but some thoughts -
The effort is touted as something of a brand new venture, although I suspect that existing applications and ongoing efforts will be grafted onto this new entity. For example, Bhoosampada (new link) allows users to browse and search for landuse and landcover data. And the National Urban GIS Mapping Mission which has promised to build standardized urban data sets is supposed to be underway to map urban areas and develop applications to aid urban governance.
My hope is that the new National GIS is not a massive duplication of efforts and that these older intiatives with some improvements will be brought within a wider umbrella effort.
There is going to a citizen layer in this application which will allow citizens to geo-tag their complaints. The principle is admirable but better governance is more hostage to a mindset than it is to technology. Today, I can either email or call or put up a status on the Pune Municipal Corporation or Pune Traffic Facebook page about a particular grievience, but the response rate is abysmal. Unless a method of personal accountability is tied up with the complaint workflow, I don't see how the citizen layer will lead to a better government -citizen partnership.
Still, it is something of a wonder that more and more government data locked up previously is making its way into the public domain. ...slowly..but that counts for progress nevertheless.
Friday, March 11, 2011
Does The Indian Govt Prefer Google Over Bhuvan?
From a note in Geospatial World I learn that the Election Commission (EC) of India might be using Google satellite images as a background layer on which to placemark the locations of polling booths along with relevant information. The project will be initiated in the state of Bengal.
If this report of using Google is true, I am curious to know why the EC chose Google over Bhuvan which also serves out satellite images and is advertised by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) to be customizable to incorporate the kind of functionality the EC wants.
Is it because - a) the EC was not aware of Bhuvan and its capabilities? In that case, ISRO has not done a good job of educating potential users about Bhuvan.
Or is it because - b) the Application Programming Interface i.e. the programming tools that allow developers to customize the application is not good enough?
Or is it because - c) Data policy restricts even government departments from accessing very high resolution imagery (1 meter) from Indian satellites for web applications, even internal ones like the proposed polling booth app. Government users may obtain without clearances high res images of a pre-defined extent i.e. images of one particular geographic area, but is a high res seamless image stream available to them through Bhuvan?
Currently the data policy allows only imagery of resolution 5.8 meters and coarser to be released free of clearances in the public domain. Due to this policy Bhuvan can only stream images of 5.8 meters and coarser to the general public. The policy is supposed to be up for a review this year.
Whatever the reasons, it's a shame that Bhuvan and high resolution imagery captured by Indian satellites is being kept away from being utilized in innovative applications.
The government and ISRO need to introspect.
If this report of using Google is true, I am curious to know why the EC chose Google over Bhuvan which also serves out satellite images and is advertised by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) to be customizable to incorporate the kind of functionality the EC wants.
Is it because - a) the EC was not aware of Bhuvan and its capabilities? In that case, ISRO has not done a good job of educating potential users about Bhuvan.
Or is it because - b) the Application Programming Interface i.e. the programming tools that allow developers to customize the application is not good enough?
Or is it because - c) Data policy restricts even government departments from accessing very high resolution imagery (1 meter) from Indian satellites for web applications, even internal ones like the proposed polling booth app. Government users may obtain without clearances high res images of a pre-defined extent i.e. images of one particular geographic area, but is a high res seamless image stream available to them through Bhuvan?
Currently the data policy allows only imagery of resolution 5.8 meters and coarser to be released free of clearances in the public domain. Due to this policy Bhuvan can only stream images of 5.8 meters and coarser to the general public. The policy is supposed to be up for a review this year.
Whatever the reasons, it's a shame that Bhuvan and high resolution imagery captured by Indian satellites is being kept away from being utilized in innovative applications.
The government and ISRO need to introspect.
Thursday, December 2, 2010
United States Water Usage Maps Through Geocommons
Just a pointer that GeoCommons, a public domain web mapping application by Fortiusone Inc has a growing collection of geology and natural resources data.
I've been having fun last couple of days downloading some U.S. water use datasets, importing them in Manifold GIS, making them map ready and then uploading them back on Geocommons. Using the Map Maker I have then presented the results in a couple of maps.
The first shows the total ground water usage by state in millions of gallons per day (colored states) and also ground water use as percent of total water use (graduated dots). Orange blocks as urban centres with population greater than fifty thousand. You can see the east west divide in water use type. The east relies a lot more on surface water. The central and western areas along with Florida in the south east rely on ground water more than the eastern states. The importance of the Ogallala or High Plains Aquifer is clearly seen in the central states as is the importance of the Central Valley Aquifer in California.
View full map
You can drill down and bring out other dimensions of this data. For example in the map below I've plotted one of these dimensions, the ground water usage for irrigation in millions of gallons per day in the High Plains counties. The High Plains Aquifer is outlined.
View full map
This is not a full "cloud GIS" yet in terms of users borrowing or leasing the full range of GIS functionality from a remote computer. I had to follow a hybrid approach as did other data donors in terms of using a personal GIS to process the data to certain specifications before uploading it to this online service. Still such services are gaining importance and functionality and they give users who don't own software an inexpensive tool to actively engage with spatial data.
I've been having fun last couple of days downloading some U.S. water use datasets, importing them in Manifold GIS, making them map ready and then uploading them back on Geocommons. Using the Map Maker I have then presented the results in a couple of maps.
The first shows the total ground water usage by state in millions of gallons per day (colored states) and also ground water use as percent of total water use (graduated dots). Orange blocks as urban centres with population greater than fifty thousand. You can see the east west divide in water use type. The east relies a lot more on surface water. The central and western areas along with Florida in the south east rely on ground water more than the eastern states. The importance of the Ogallala or High Plains Aquifer is clearly seen in the central states as is the importance of the Central Valley Aquifer in California.
View full map
You can drill down and bring out other dimensions of this data. For example in the map below I've plotted one of these dimensions, the ground water usage for irrigation in millions of gallons per day in the High Plains counties. The High Plains Aquifer is outlined.
View full map
This is not a full "cloud GIS" yet in terms of users borrowing or leasing the full range of GIS functionality from a remote computer. I had to follow a hybrid approach as did other data donors in terms of using a personal GIS to process the data to certain specifications before uploading it to this online service. Still such services are gaining importance and functionality and they give users who don't own software an inexpensive tool to actively engage with spatial data.
Monday, October 4, 2010
A New Version Of Bhuvan Has Been Released
The Indian Space Research Organization has released a new beta version of Bhuvan a web mapping tool which serves images of India and the rest of the world taken from various Indian remote sensing satellites. It is available in 2D and 3D versions.
The new versions looks a little slicker and cleaner than its predecessor. But 5.8 meters is the highest resolution imagery available via Bhuvan while Google Maps and Google Earth both have long started serving 1 meter or so images of Indian cities and hinterland.
In case you are wondering why, here is the Remote Sensing data policy of the Government of India:
With a view to protect national security interests, all data of 5.8 m and better than 5.8 m resolution images will be screened by the appropriate agency before distribution so that images of sensitive areas are excluded.
a. Data of 5.8m and up to 1m resolution can be distributed to users after screening and ensuring that the sensitive areas are excluded.
b. Data of 1m resolution and better will also be screened as above and the following procedure will be followed for its distribution.
i. Government users can obtain the data without any further clearance.
ii. Private sector agencies, recommended by at least one Government agency for use of 1 m and better resolution data for supporting development activities, can obtain it without any further clearance.
iii. Private, foreign and other users can obtain the data after further clearance from an inter-agency High Resolution Image Clearance Committee (HRC).
iv. Specific requests for data of sensitive areas, by any user, can be distributed only after obtaining clearance from HRC.
v. Specific sale/non-disclosure agreements to be concluded between NRSC and users for data of 1 m resolution and better.
What this means is that under the current policy scenario, high resolution (1 meter or so) images collected from Indian satellites will not be available via open access free web mapping tools like Bhuvan. The only users of this high res imagery will be those who have obtained clearances for images of pre-defined geographic extent to be viewed in specialized GIS and Remote Sensing software.
This will severely limit the user base of Bhuvan and Indian imagery:
For example-
1) That means despite a developer API for Bhuvan being available there will likely be few takers especially for designers of urban applications.
2) And Bhuvan for the mobile market?... all those location apps, business listings, navigation already available via Google..?... forget it.. can't be done when your street and neighborhood looks like an undifferentiated granular blob.
3) Additional India specific thematic layers..?... many already available at other free web mapping apps like Geocommons, India Biodiversity Portal, Bhoosampada, and Census India Web Mapping.
unless there is a policy shift with regards to availability of high resolution images... I don't see the point of Bhuvan..
The new versions looks a little slicker and cleaner than its predecessor. But 5.8 meters is the highest resolution imagery available via Bhuvan while Google Maps and Google Earth both have long started serving 1 meter or so images of Indian cities and hinterland.
In case you are wondering why, here is the Remote Sensing data policy of the Government of India:
Government prescribes the following guidelines to be adopted for dissemination of satellite remote sensing data in India:
All data of resolutions up to 5.8 m shall be distributed on a nondiscriminatory basis and on “as requested basis”.
All data of resolutions up to 5.8 m shall be distributed on a nondiscriminatory basis and on “as requested basis”.
With a view to protect national security interests, all data of 5.8 m and better than 5.8 m resolution images will be screened by the appropriate agency before distribution so that images of sensitive areas are excluded.
a. Data of 5.8m and up to 1m resolution can be distributed to users after screening and ensuring that the sensitive areas are excluded.
b. Data of 1m resolution and better will also be screened as above and the following procedure will be followed for its distribution.
i. Government users can obtain the data without any further clearance.
ii. Private sector agencies, recommended by at least one Government agency for use of 1 m and better resolution data for supporting development activities, can obtain it without any further clearance.
iii. Private, foreign and other users can obtain the data after further clearance from an inter-agency High Resolution Image Clearance Committee (HRC).
iv. Specific requests for data of sensitive areas, by any user, can be distributed only after obtaining clearance from HRC.
v. Specific sale/non-disclosure agreements to be concluded between NRSC and users for data of 1 m resolution and better.
What this means is that under the current policy scenario, high resolution (1 meter or so) images collected from Indian satellites will not be available via open access free web mapping tools like Bhuvan. The only users of this high res imagery will be those who have obtained clearances for images of pre-defined geographic extent to be viewed in specialized GIS and Remote Sensing software.
This will severely limit the user base of Bhuvan and Indian imagery:
For example-
1) That means despite a developer API for Bhuvan being available there will likely be few takers especially for designers of urban applications.
2) And Bhuvan for the mobile market?... all those location apps, business listings, navigation already available via Google..?... forget it.. can't be done when your street and neighborhood looks like an undifferentiated granular blob.
3) Additional India specific thematic layers..?... many already available at other free web mapping apps like Geocommons, India Biodiversity Portal, Bhoosampada, and Census India Web Mapping.
unless there is a policy shift with regards to availability of high resolution images... I don't see the point of Bhuvan..
Monday, May 17, 2010
The Passionate Saga Of India's Spatial Data Infrastructure
Why passionate?.... feel free to scroll to the bottom of the post for that tidbit..
I've been having an email conversation with a reader about India's National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI), the promised digital gateway to spatial data on the country's natural resources, urban infrastructure, demographic information and so on.
To summarize the technological components that need to be built for the NSDI to become functional -
1) Contributing agencies have to get their data digitized and metadata available to NSDI standards.
2) Contributing agencies have to develop web map applications to view and query this data.
3) The NSDI portal will be a centralized gateway to this data and applications and also provide additional mapping applications at various levels of user access.
Right now all this is still something of a mirage. The web portal is up but not quite functional, since all contributing agencies have yet to make available data and applications to access and query this data. Still the NSDI portal is an interesting place to visit if only to get a glimpse of its immense potential. A list of and links to the contributing agencies are available.
To those frustrated users of spatial data, conditioned by the stifling bureaucracy to filling out forms and waiting for months to get security clearances to use data, the prospect of a one click access to spatial data is a wish too good to be true and cannot come soon enough.
Some of this one click nirvana is already a reality with individual government and non-government initiatives publishing their data via web maps. I made a quick list of available services:
1) Bhoosampada- Indian government initiative to share land use land cover data
2) Bhuvan- Touted as a Google Earth killer, shares satellite images and some natural resources layers
3) Census India Maps: Indian government initiative to share census data.
4) The Indian Bioresources Information Network: Indian government initiative to share biodiversity and forest data. I have not been able to register as a user at the time of writing.
5) Central Ground Water Board Map Service: Government released data on groundwater. I have not been able to register to this at the time of writing.
6) Wasteland Information System: Government data on wastelands. This as yet appears to be an internal application, not released in to the public domain.
7) India Biodiversity Portal- Non-Government initiative to distribute natural resources and census data.
Besides these, no doubt there are plenty of internal applications being used by various government agencies. Eventually all these services will be absorbed under the NSDI umbrella along with the already named contributors and other new interested parties who want to part of this national data service.
I have been showering praise on government efforts so far. Now its time to turn around and give a sharp kick in the buttocks.
I have tried to register to a couple of these applications and have got no response from the contact personnel assigned to deal with this. A more friendly and responsive interface with potential and existing users must develop. Also all these above government applications need to be rethought from a design perspective. Users are becoming more aware of location based services and the slick interfaces through which such services are being rendered on their PC's and mobiles. The clunky interfaces of these government applications might turn away lots of users... and thirdly... usability...usability..usability... that should be the mantra. As of now the data structure, the menus and the query design...all assume specialist users. For the curious citizen not trained in navigating map services and not used to looking at underlying data, it will be a tough slog to extract any useful information. The interfaces need to be simplified...
Finally, coming to the passionate part of this saga, I noticed a link on the lower right side of the NSDI portal titled "NSDI A Passionate Saga". Curious, I downloaded the document and found out it was a personal account of the building of the NSDI from concept to its as yet be fully realized status written by the people involved.
It was a bit like the documentaries you see on HBO these days about Hollywood movies.. "The Making Of...such and such"...
but keeping with Indian government policy...without the coy references to the sex scenes.
I've been having an email conversation with a reader about India's National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI), the promised digital gateway to spatial data on the country's natural resources, urban infrastructure, demographic information and so on.
To summarize the technological components that need to be built for the NSDI to become functional -
1) Contributing agencies have to get their data digitized and metadata available to NSDI standards.
2) Contributing agencies have to develop web map applications to view and query this data.
3) The NSDI portal will be a centralized gateway to this data and applications and also provide additional mapping applications at various levels of user access.
Right now all this is still something of a mirage. The web portal is up but not quite functional, since all contributing agencies have yet to make available data and applications to access and query this data. Still the NSDI portal is an interesting place to visit if only to get a glimpse of its immense potential. A list of and links to the contributing agencies are available.
To those frustrated users of spatial data, conditioned by the stifling bureaucracy to filling out forms and waiting for months to get security clearances to use data, the prospect of a one click access to spatial data is a wish too good to be true and cannot come soon enough.
Some of this one click nirvana is already a reality with individual government and non-government initiatives publishing their data via web maps. I made a quick list of available services:
1) Bhoosampada- Indian government initiative to share land use land cover data
2) Bhuvan- Touted as a Google Earth killer, shares satellite images and some natural resources layers
3) Census India Maps: Indian government initiative to share census data.
4) The Indian Bioresources Information Network: Indian government initiative to share biodiversity and forest data. I have not been able to register as a user at the time of writing.
5) Central Ground Water Board Map Service: Government released data on groundwater. I have not been able to register to this at the time of writing.
6) Wasteland Information System: Government data on wastelands. This as yet appears to be an internal application, not released in to the public domain.
7) India Biodiversity Portal- Non-Government initiative to distribute natural resources and census data.
Besides these, no doubt there are plenty of internal applications being used by various government agencies. Eventually all these services will be absorbed under the NSDI umbrella along with the already named contributors and other new interested parties who want to part of this national data service.
I have been showering praise on government efforts so far. Now its time to turn around and give a sharp kick in the buttocks.
I have tried to register to a couple of these applications and have got no response from the contact personnel assigned to deal with this. A more friendly and responsive interface with potential and existing users must develop. Also all these above government applications need to be rethought from a design perspective. Users are becoming more aware of location based services and the slick interfaces through which such services are being rendered on their PC's and mobiles. The clunky interfaces of these government applications might turn away lots of users... and thirdly... usability...usability..usability... that should be the mantra. As of now the data structure, the menus and the query design...all assume specialist users. For the curious citizen not trained in navigating map services and not used to looking at underlying data, it will be a tough slog to extract any useful information. The interfaces need to be simplified...
Finally, coming to the passionate part of this saga, I noticed a link on the lower right side of the NSDI portal titled "NSDI A Passionate Saga". Curious, I downloaded the document and found out it was a personal account of the building of the NSDI from concept to its as yet be fully realized status written by the people involved.
It was a bit like the documentaries you see on HBO these days about Hollywood movies.. "The Making Of...such and such"...
but keeping with Indian government policy...without the coy references to the sex scenes.
Monday, March 1, 2010
Maps Of The Chilean Earthquake
Some maps of the Chilean earthquake:
1) Henry Fountain of the NY Times writes about the geologic setting of the earthquake accompanied by tectonic and fault maps of the region.
2) The United States Geological Survey has a collection of maps and reports on their earthquake site.
3) GeoCommons, which is a public mapping site run by FortiusOne, a data visualization company, has a series of interactive GIS layers on Chile. In case you haven't come across GeoCommons, I highly recommend their data Finder and map Maker applications.
1) Henry Fountain of the NY Times writes about the geologic setting of the earthquake accompanied by tectonic and fault maps of the region.
2) The United States Geological Survey has a collection of maps and reports on their earthquake site.
3) GeoCommons, which is a public mapping site run by FortiusOne, a data visualization company, has a series of interactive GIS layers on Chile. In case you haven't come across GeoCommons, I highly recommend their data Finder and map Maker applications.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Mapping India: Can The RTI Be Extended To The NSDI
A clarion call seems to have been issued by the high priests of Indian government spatial data--
Resistance is futile...join the collective.
The Borg in this case is the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI), an ambitious, much needed, slowly being built but yet to be fully realized vision to enable easy open and quick access to public domain spatial data.
The latest to join this collective is another web mapping application, this time developed by the Central Ground Water Board. I began this post wanting to review it, but found it agonizingly slow the few times I tried to use it.
Instead I started thinking about the NSDI and what it could potentially do to facilitate a better engagement of civil society with government...more specifically..
can the mechanism of acquiring information through the Right To Information Act (RTI) be extended and modified to these web mapping applications under the umbrella of the NSDI?
Traditionally users of spatial information in India fall into two extreme categories. There are those "lightweight" users who go on the excellent mapping services of Google, Yahoo..so on and use the images to locate items of interest, find directions, distances and create custom maps by putting placemarks and routes. The image quality is excellent but the apps have no serious analytical capability.
At the other pole are "serious" GIS users who access spatial data from heavyweight GIS and image processing packages with extended analytical and mapping capabilities. These users are spatial data professionals working in both the public and private sector.
The NSDI will create a third kind of a user....someone who may not formally work in GIS, may not have access to or afford access to a GIS, but nevertheless may want access to spatial data and may want to ask sophisticated spatial questions. The web mapping applications that owners of public domain spatial data must create, will provide a gateway to such user aspirations.
This opens up exciting possibilities for civic groups, NGO's and curious citizens..the third user group.. so to speak, who want to examine and question government on the status of natural resources, urban planning and developmental projects..all areas where spatial reasoning is critical.
Entering a web mapping app via the NSDI it would be possible for example to ask:
1) For a particular area..show me the locations of ground water wells with contaminants above a specified quantity, within a specified distance of a known point pollution source...potentially through the CGWB web app
2) For Ward X of city Y...prepare a map of lakes and streams and encroachments within these green zones...potentially through the Urban Mapping Mission websites.
3) ...For district X prepare a map of forest land with various levels of legal protection and the location of planned developmental projects within and near these forests...potentially through the Ministry of Environment and Forest website.
There will be some limitations to this kind of approach to information access:
1) The type of information a user may want is not included as a spatial layer in that particular web app.
2) The web app is not equipped with a query engine capable of performing the analysis.
3) The user knows what (s)he wants but does not have the expertise to perform the analysis.
4) The query might encompass a very large area and might run into bandwidth and application performance issues.
..so.. why not bypass these limitations which are sure to crop up and enable the user via the mapping application to compose a question, not using the formal query engine but ...in plain language like the ones above... and send them to a designated Spatial Information Officer. That officer - and each public domain web mapping application will have one - will process the query using a GIS and if required gather information from other sources and send the compiled answer within a specified time line.
The answers would be sent as a map in an image format and associated attribute data could be sent as an excel or a database file. Administrative costs can be charged through online credit card payments or can be sent via a check.
In effect the RTI will be extended to include these public domain web mapping sites as an official application counter for information.
At present the NSDI and each of the associated agencies do have an RTI officer. But you have to apply to a central office for information. That central office may not have developed the needed synergy and cooperation with its GIS office to efficiently process your query.
I am thinking in terms of a decentralized mechanism wherein queries are sent directly through individual web mapping applications to the spatial information officer in charge of that application and answers to these queries are generated by processing the spatial databases underlying the web mapping app.
I have a feeling that something along these line must be put in place if the NSDI wants to fulfill its promise of open access to data. The first few web mapping sites I have come across do not have truly dynamic query engines that would enable a user to perform sophisticated analysis. Besides, the government may choose to present the pubic with only a limited view of the total data set.
Placing these web mapping sites within the ambit of the RTI would mean that all the information sitting in the underlying databases and not just the subset view presented via the mapping applications will be open to and can be accessed by the public.
Moreover, the spatial layers and associated databases if correctly attributed and structured, will give results to queries potentially within a few minutes. So this method will have a huge advantage over a traditional RTI query, the answer to which will have to put together painstakingly from disparate files which may not yield very well to spatial queries.
Mapping applications under the NSDI will allow citizens to view, browse and query public domain data with a geographic context. Sorting through data this way..thinking of spatial relationships between objects... may inspire citizens to think of new questions to ask and in to new ways of analyzing information. A more productive and open relationship between citizen and government can be forged if the NSDI opens up to these possibilities.
See: Mapping India
Resistance is futile...join the collective.
The Borg in this case is the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI), an ambitious, much needed, slowly being built but yet to be fully realized vision to enable easy open and quick access to public domain spatial data.
The latest to join this collective is another web mapping application, this time developed by the Central Ground Water Board. I began this post wanting to review it, but found it agonizingly slow the few times I tried to use it.
Instead I started thinking about the NSDI and what it could potentially do to facilitate a better engagement of civil society with government...more specifically..
can the mechanism of acquiring information through the Right To Information Act (RTI) be extended and modified to these web mapping applications under the umbrella of the NSDI?
Traditionally users of spatial information in India fall into two extreme categories. There are those "lightweight" users who go on the excellent mapping services of Google, Yahoo..so on and use the images to locate items of interest, find directions, distances and create custom maps by putting placemarks and routes. The image quality is excellent but the apps have no serious analytical capability.
At the other pole are "serious" GIS users who access spatial data from heavyweight GIS and image processing packages with extended analytical and mapping capabilities. These users are spatial data professionals working in both the public and private sector.
The NSDI will create a third kind of a user....someone who may not formally work in GIS, may not have access to or afford access to a GIS, but nevertheless may want access to spatial data and may want to ask sophisticated spatial questions. The web mapping applications that owners of public domain spatial data must create, will provide a gateway to such user aspirations.
This opens up exciting possibilities for civic groups, NGO's and curious citizens..the third user group.. so to speak, who want to examine and question government on the status of natural resources, urban planning and developmental projects..all areas where spatial reasoning is critical.
Entering a web mapping app via the NSDI it would be possible for example to ask:
1) For a particular area..show me the locations of ground water wells with contaminants above a specified quantity, within a specified distance of a known point pollution source...potentially through the CGWB web app
2) For Ward X of city Y...prepare a map of lakes and streams and encroachments within these green zones...potentially through the Urban Mapping Mission websites.
3) ...For district X prepare a map of forest land with various levels of legal protection and the location of planned developmental projects within and near these forests...potentially through the Ministry of Environment and Forest website.
There will be some limitations to this kind of approach to information access:
1) The type of information a user may want is not included as a spatial layer in that particular web app.
2) The web app is not equipped with a query engine capable of performing the analysis.
3) The user knows what (s)he wants but does not have the expertise to perform the analysis.
4) The query might encompass a very large area and might run into bandwidth and application performance issues.
..so.. why not bypass these limitations which are sure to crop up and enable the user via the mapping application to compose a question, not using the formal query engine but ...in plain language like the ones above... and send them to a designated Spatial Information Officer. That officer - and each public domain web mapping application will have one - will process the query using a GIS and if required gather information from other sources and send the compiled answer within a specified time line.
The answers would be sent as a map in an image format and associated attribute data could be sent as an excel or a database file. Administrative costs can be charged through online credit card payments or can be sent via a check.
In effect the RTI will be extended to include these public domain web mapping sites as an official application counter for information.
At present the NSDI and each of the associated agencies do have an RTI officer. But you have to apply to a central office for information. That central office may not have developed the needed synergy and cooperation with its GIS office to efficiently process your query.
I am thinking in terms of a decentralized mechanism wherein queries are sent directly through individual web mapping applications to the spatial information officer in charge of that application and answers to these queries are generated by processing the spatial databases underlying the web mapping app.
I have a feeling that something along these line must be put in place if the NSDI wants to fulfill its promise of open access to data. The first few web mapping sites I have come across do not have truly dynamic query engines that would enable a user to perform sophisticated analysis. Besides, the government may choose to present the pubic with only a limited view of the total data set.
Placing these web mapping sites within the ambit of the RTI would mean that all the information sitting in the underlying databases and not just the subset view presented via the mapping applications will be open to and can be accessed by the public.
Moreover, the spatial layers and associated databases if correctly attributed and structured, will give results to queries potentially within a few minutes. So this method will have a huge advantage over a traditional RTI query, the answer to which will have to put together painstakingly from disparate files which may not yield very well to spatial queries.
Mapping applications under the NSDI will allow citizens to view, browse and query public domain data with a geographic context. Sorting through data this way..thinking of spatial relationships between objects... may inspire citizens to think of new questions to ask and in to new ways of analyzing information. A more productive and open relationship between citizen and government can be forged if the NSDI opens up to these possibilities.
See: Mapping India
Monday, January 11, 2010
Wow! ...You Can Do That With A Satellite Imagery?
Here is an early candidate for this years confusing reporting on satellite imagery applications award.
From gisdevelopment.net a well known Asian GIS portal:
....BWSSB (Bangalore Water Supply and Sewage Board) has installed bulk flow meters to monitor the flow of water in different areas and to check the wastage of water.
That's it.....the press release does not explain how.
Which means that lots of people not familiar with how imagery is collected and used will think that a water leak leaves a particular signature that can be recognized in a satellite image and that's how the Bangalore city government is going to keep a tab on leakages.
But that's not how it works. The pipes are buried under asphalt and concrete. For most GIS applications, satellite sensors which image in the visible and near infrared wavelengths are used to collect earth information. These wavelengths cannot penetrate the ground and image the buried water pipes. Even if there are lengths where pipes are exposed there is no way satellite imagery can be used to monitor leakage on a day to day basis.
Why? ...No..its not just that the spatial resolution won't be enough.
M: Where is 007 right now Q?
Q: ...(peering on towards a large screen)...Hmm...looks like he is skiing in Austria...his thermal trace is clearly visible..
Despite this fantasy land depiction of satellite imagery, there is no real-time feed of data in the real world of remote sensing and imagery analysis. Remote Sensing satellites, like the ones used by Google Maps and ISRO's Bhuvan, spin around the earth and image the same location every few weeks or so. They simply can't be used to monitor just one location for apps like water leakage.
Besides a lack of understanding of spatial and spectral resolution I think this is the biggest misunderstanding about satellite imagery that persists in popular imagination. Which is why the media keeps reporting that high resolution imagery can now be used to count the number of lions in Gir forest and to locate fish shoals.
So... can imagery to be used in applications like monitoring leakage from water pipes?
Yes, but their role will be as a reference to location. A city GIS will have several thematic layers...say roads, building footprints, green zones, cables and pipes all overlain on a geographic reference layer which could be a topographic map or a high resolution satellite image. The image being used as a backdrop may be six months or even a year old. The actual information about leakage is obtained from instruments like flow meters. The location of each flow meter along the pipes is known. This information by cross referencing the pipe layer with the imagery will help repair crews familiarize themselves with the exact location of the leaking pipe.
Tip: Rashid's Blog
From gisdevelopment.net a well known Asian GIS portal:
....BWSSB (Bangalore Water Supply and Sewage Board) has installed bulk flow meters to monitor the flow of water in different areas and to check the wastage of water.
The board is expecting that GIS will help the department in checking the unaccounted for water. BWSSB has undertaken two major pilot projects to study the feasibility of implementing the system. The first of the two is expected to help the department, trace the leakage in the city through satellite imagery.
That's it.....the press release does not explain how.
Which means that lots of people not familiar with how imagery is collected and used will think that a water leak leaves a particular signature that can be recognized in a satellite image and that's how the Bangalore city government is going to keep a tab on leakages.
But that's not how it works. The pipes are buried under asphalt and concrete. For most GIS applications, satellite sensors which image in the visible and near infrared wavelengths are used to collect earth information. These wavelengths cannot penetrate the ground and image the buried water pipes. Even if there are lengths where pipes are exposed there is no way satellite imagery can be used to monitor leakage on a day to day basis.
Why? ...No..its not just that the spatial resolution won't be enough.
M: Where is 007 right now Q?
Q: ...(peering on towards a large screen)...Hmm...looks like he is skiing in Austria...his thermal trace is clearly visible..
Despite this fantasy land depiction of satellite imagery, there is no real-time feed of data in the real world of remote sensing and imagery analysis. Remote Sensing satellites, like the ones used by Google Maps and ISRO's Bhuvan, spin around the earth and image the same location every few weeks or so. They simply can't be used to monitor just one location for apps like water leakage.
Besides a lack of understanding of spatial and spectral resolution I think this is the biggest misunderstanding about satellite imagery that persists in popular imagination. Which is why the media keeps reporting that high resolution imagery can now be used to count the number of lions in Gir forest and to locate fish shoals.
So... can imagery to be used in applications like monitoring leakage from water pipes?
Yes, but their role will be as a reference to location. A city GIS will have several thematic layers...say roads, building footprints, green zones, cables and pipes all overlain on a geographic reference layer which could be a topographic map or a high resolution satellite image. The image being used as a backdrop may be six months or even a year old. The actual information about leakage is obtained from instruments like flow meters. The location of each flow meter along the pipes is known. This information by cross referencing the pipe layer with the imagery will help repair crews familiarize themselves with the exact location of the leaking pipe.
Tip: Rashid's Blog
Monday, August 17, 2009
Indian Space Org's First Release Bhuvan Is A Dud
The Indian Space Research Organization just doesn't get it does it?
If it aspires to be player in the innovative and fast evolving world of web mapping applications, then a product launch that got so much pre -launch publicity needs to have a serious wow factor to it. It must shake up old and new users.
Agreed you may not have all the data and all the planned functionality ready but what you present to your audience should at least have the appearance of completeness. You should put out whatever best data you have and make sure all the tools and functions are in working order. Beta release and future potential are all well accepted processes and norms within the software industry, but web map users who have over the last few years become fat on a diet of elegant and increasingly sophisticated products are going to be making a spot judgment on what you have now.
Agreed you may not have all the data and all the planned functionality ready but what you present to your audience should at least have the appearance of completeness. You should put out whatever best data you have and make sure all the tools and functions are in working order. Beta release and future potential are all well accepted processes and norms within the software industry, but web map users who have over the last few years become fat on a diet of elegant and increasingly sophisticated products are going to be making a spot judgment on what you have now.
And for this first release of Bhuvan that means ....not much.
But I am getting ahead of myself. Ambuj Saxena beat me to it. He blogs at Devils Workshop and has a nice post on his experience with Bhuvan. I concur with many of his criticisms that Bhuvan has been hastily put together and users are going to get annoyed that it just doesn't stand up to its pre launch hype in terms of image quality and other functionality.
Albeit critical Devangshu Datta in an article on Bhuvan in the Business Standard takes a mellower and longer view and points to the potential of a product like this. I am more apprehensive for reasons I will elaborate later and I feel most users who want an immediate rich and inspiring experience will need some persuasion that Bhuvan can be significantly improved upon.
I just want to go through the four points I had raised in my speculative preview of Bhuvan and then add more thoughts on some of the details of the product and user experience.
1) Will the images from Bhuvan be superior to that provided by Google? - It is going to be a crushing blow to users who having followed the pre- launch announcements would have gone on Bhuvan expecting high resolution images of their cities and homes. ISRO decided to keep its best data away and instead serve up coarser data from its Linear Imaging Self Scanner (LISS) LISS 3 and LiSS 4 sensors aboard its IRS satellite series. That means a resolution ranging from about 24 meters to about 5 meters. ISRO has better data than this. Its Cartosat 1 satellite has been imaging India for the last 4 years and Cartosat 2 for the last one year. That data is 2.5 meters and 0.8 meters resolution resp. The quicker that comes online the better.
Right now Google products win hands down.
The image clarity issue has been a fiasco for ISRO. For months the media excitedly wrote that Bhuvan will be offering images much better than Google. ISRO kept silent and did not issue much needed correctives, thereby implicitly supporting the tripe the media was offering. Then after all this they go and offer us second level imagery. Its enough to turn away potential users in disgust.
The image clarity issue has been a fiasco for ISRO. For months the media excitedly wrote that Bhuvan will be offering images much better than Google. ISRO kept silent and did not issue much needed correctives, thereby implicitly supporting the tripe the media was offering. Then after all this they go and offer us second level imagery. Its enough to turn away potential users in disgust.
2) Will ISRO make other data available? - Yes, Bhuvan has administrative data like state, district and tehsil boundaries, transportation data like national highways and natural resources data like rivers, water bodies, wasteland, and soil. A limited selection but more might be on the way. I have more to say about data later in this post.
3) Will Bhuvan be like Google Maps or like Google Earth? - There was conflicting information on this. The indications were that Bhuvan might be like Google Maps, meaning a true web enabled mapping service. I guessed wrong in an earlier post. ISRO has decided to engineer it more like Google Earth. That means you have to download software. Bhuvan is a local application which gets only images from a remote server. Otherwise the application interface, all the menus, tools and other functionality is being served from your hard drive. This does make the interface more efficient and quick. I've heard quibbles about the 10 Mb download. But I would rather suffer a onetime download and then work with a fast interface than perpetually get frustrated waiting for the entire interface being served over a limited bandwidth.
The less known fact is that the 3D capabilities of Bhuvan, i.e. the app that lets us drape and visualize images in a 3D environment is actually being run from a tool called Terra Explorer a 3D environment geospatial application specialist owned by Skyline. ISRO has licensed Terra Explorer to serve as a foundation for Bhuvan. The rest of Bhuvan functionality is built on top of this Terra Explorer core.
I could not find this information anywhere in the documentation on their website. Ambuj mentioned this in his post. Curiously when I was playing around installing and uninstalling Bhuvan I got a notification .......Terra Explorer uninstalled!
I just had to laugh. So much for the chest beating and boasting that Bhuvan is an indigenous alternative to Google Earth.
4) Will ISRO allow open access to the Bhuvan API? - No indication that ISRO is going to allow an open API for customizing this product. This is a real pity. It will severely limit use of this product as innovators will flock to applications like Google Maps to create complex applications and mashups which means less use of ISRO imagery and data.
ISRO in fact may not be able to open up its API even if it wanted to because that may violate its licensing agreement with Terra Explorer.
On to some other concerns I have about Bhuvan -
a) Performance optimization for Indian users- Google Earth has a great feature. You can work offline. When you first go online and call up images for a certain area, those images at the zoom extent you have seeing them are stored in cache. You can go offline and work with those images from cache. You can't obviously call up any new images but if you are doing concentrated work on only one area you can work offline. ISRO missed out on this feature. Since the software resides on your computer working offline would have been a boon in Indian conditions where connectivity is erratic and where lots of users buy limited download packages from their ISP.
b) Elements of cartography, map layer control , aesthetics- Can we have a visual display of map layers that looks a bit professional please? As of now the most elementary principles of cartography and map layer control are missing. For example the icon for city is the default pin! And it doesn't scale to zoom extent. Boundaries and roads are not displayed with proper line thicknesses and polygon color fills can't be seen. Labels likewise don't scale and are garishly colored. ISRO needs to hire professional map makers and designers to work on this one.
c) Who is Bhuvan aimed at? I am becoming more puzzled by the question of which user community ISRO is trying to target. The fastest growing user base for mapping applications in India are people interested in urban location based apps. But ISRO has effectively shut itself from this potential user base. Currently the images are just too coarse for any meaningful urban visualization and analysis. Getting Cartosat 2 images online will bring images comparable to Google Maps within reach of Indian users.
But a deeper problem awaits. I suspect the Indian government does not have ownership of annotated detailed street maps and city feature layers. Over the years Urban GIS has been neglected by the government. The detailed street maps and annotations you see in apps like Google Maps for Indian cities have been collected by private players and have been licensed to Google. The government sees the need for detailed urban datasets and has launched the Urban Mapping Mission. But it may be years before the mission produces data and Bhuvan gets detailed street maps owned by the government.
The immediate option would be to license street maps from private owners but I doubt they will do that. And again even having detailed street maps will be of limited use to users and developers if they don't have an open API to build value added services on top of this base data.
Which leaves Bhuvan with users interested in natural resources.
d) Will even good natural resources data save Bhuvan? This is the one area where Bhuvan is claiming a clear advantage over Google products and services i.e. availability of Indian natural resources data sets. With this release rivers, wasteland and soil data layers are available for information retrieval. But again I have doubts. They layers are not exclusively found in Bhuvan. For example the elegantly designed India Biodiversity Portal already has several natural resources data sets online which overlap with what Bhuvan is offering. Another government venture Bhoosampada offers land use and land cover data from which you can extract wasteland info again overlapping with Bhuvan.
So I am not sure if Bhuvan can maintain a clear advantage over other services even in natural resources datasets. This problem will get exacerbated when the National Spatial Data Infrastructure brings even more datasets onto the public domain. Non government / private organizations are sure to mine them to create innovative products.
My fear is Bhuvan given the stuttering incremental way in which government works will always be lagging behind.
In summary for your India data needs:
For best imagery- Google Earth / Google Maps
For Urban Data Needs - Google Maps
For Natural Resources Data Needs - India Biodiversity Portal, Bhoosampada, Bhuvan
Also check out GeoCommons for India Census data. Its is another upcoming public domain mapping platform with improving India data sets.
A Beta release does not mean releasing a product which is virtually useless. And given the web mapping ecosystem in which Bhuvan is competing this product is incomplete to the point of being useless. It will certainly evolve and improve in the future and offer a specialized group of users an information retrieval and sharing system for natural resources and village level data but so will other products offering similar services and data sets. I don't see a broad user base for this application.
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
I Finally Downloaded Aster 30 M Elevation Data
30 meter elevation data set for India, part of a global data set from the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) is available for download free of charge from the NASA's Land Process Distributed Active Archive Centre.
The ASTER instrument has a steroscopic imaging capability in the near-infrared band. The elevation data is extracted from this stereo-data by auto-stereocorrelation of nadir (directly below ortho view)) and along-track oblique view of the ASTER sensors.
The data is partitioned into 1 deg by 1 deg tiles. So instead of downloading just one massive file you can download data in small chunks of about 8 Mb -12 Mb size. The download is a zip file. That's really convenient for users with slowish connections. The DEM upon extract is about 24 Mb. The download process requires a little patience. It has plenty of little intermediate steps you have to complete before the final order form is submitted. At the end of the process you will be emailed a ftp URL. You can pull your selected data set from that ftp folder. Do study the download tutorial before proceeding.
I got to know of it a few weeks back from a GIS forum I follow. Yesterday night I finally decided to test the download process. Within an hour I had registered an account , made my selection and downloaded elevation data for the region around Pune, India. See the image below. I imported the DEM in Manifold GIS and created a quick display. I have shown 2 tiles, only part of the data I downloaded. The upper tile is shown in a gray palette and the lower in a standard altitude palette. I have overlain a 0.5 deg graticule grid for reference.
Free data is always good news. Users though have to be careful when applying ASTER data for their various needs. ASTER is a relative DEM which means that the elevation data has been constructed entirely using the stereo-images with no corrections applied using ground control points. The positional accuracy and the feature integrity is determined by the knowledge of sensor parameters and shape of the geoid. Accuracy assessment of the ASTER product by comparing it with other DEM and ground control points suggests overall horizontal and vertical accuracy of about 20 m but may be worse locally. Topographic artifacts and inaccuracies in feature geometry also exist. Also although the elevations are posted at 30 m interval the details of topographic features that can be resolved appears to be about 100 m or so.
You can improve on ASTER data by reconstructing the DEM by inputting additional elevation information from ground control points in a competent raster processing software. But the raw data will have inaccuracies and so is not a good bet for any detailed work that needs highly accurate terrain information. Good enough to use as a backdrop and for reconnaissance and preliminary research purposes.
The image below is a close up of the West India coastal plains leading up eastwards to the western ghat escarpment (the sharp contrast between the light green and the dark green) and part of the plateau.
This is a welcome addition to the list of spatial data for India. A 30 arc second or 1 km resolution DEM is available for download free of charge from the USGS. You can also order elevation data for India from the Environment Information Centre, a Ministry of Env. and Forest data warehouse. This terrain model is extracted from source topographic maps of 1:50,000 scale and will have more positional accuracy and feature integrity than the raw ASTER output although it will be likely of coarser resolution. You will have to pay for this data set; about Rs 12,000 ($ 250/-) for every 100 sq km. A 30 m resolution data set (100 m in practice) improves on these older data sets in terms of resolution but not necessarily in terms of the accuracy.
NASA has indicated that this is the first release and improvements to this data set will follow in the future.
You can download data from this NASA data distribution site. There is a mirror site in Japan too.
The ASTER instrument has a steroscopic imaging capability in the near-infrared band. The elevation data is extracted from this stereo-data by auto-stereocorrelation of nadir (directly below ortho view)) and along-track oblique view of the ASTER sensors.
The data is partitioned into 1 deg by 1 deg tiles. So instead of downloading just one massive file you can download data in small chunks of about 8 Mb -12 Mb size. The download is a zip file. That's really convenient for users with slowish connections. The DEM upon extract is about 24 Mb. The download process requires a little patience. It has plenty of little intermediate steps you have to complete before the final order form is submitted. At the end of the process you will be emailed a ftp URL. You can pull your selected data set from that ftp folder. Do study the download tutorial before proceeding.
I got to know of it a few weeks back from a GIS forum I follow. Yesterday night I finally decided to test the download process. Within an hour I had registered an account , made my selection and downloaded elevation data for the region around Pune, India. See the image below. I imported the DEM in Manifold GIS and created a quick display. I have shown 2 tiles, only part of the data I downloaded. The upper tile is shown in a gray palette and the lower in a standard altitude palette. I have overlain a 0.5 deg graticule grid for reference.
Free data is always good news. Users though have to be careful when applying ASTER data for their various needs. ASTER is a relative DEM which means that the elevation data has been constructed entirely using the stereo-images with no corrections applied using ground control points. The positional accuracy and the feature integrity is determined by the knowledge of sensor parameters and shape of the geoid. Accuracy assessment of the ASTER product by comparing it with other DEM and ground control points suggests overall horizontal and vertical accuracy of about 20 m but may be worse locally. Topographic artifacts and inaccuracies in feature geometry also exist. Also although the elevations are posted at 30 m interval the details of topographic features that can be resolved appears to be about 100 m or so.
You can improve on ASTER data by reconstructing the DEM by inputting additional elevation information from ground control points in a competent raster processing software. But the raw data will have inaccuracies and so is not a good bet for any detailed work that needs highly accurate terrain information. Good enough to use as a backdrop and for reconnaissance and preliminary research purposes.
The image below is a close up of the West India coastal plains leading up eastwards to the western ghat escarpment (the sharp contrast between the light green and the dark green) and part of the plateau.
This is a welcome addition to the list of spatial data for India. A 30 arc second or 1 km resolution DEM is available for download free of charge from the USGS. You can also order elevation data for India from the Environment Information Centre, a Ministry of Env. and Forest data warehouse. This terrain model is extracted from source topographic maps of 1:50,000 scale and will have more positional accuracy and feature integrity than the raw ASTER output although it will be likely of coarser resolution. You will have to pay for this data set; about Rs 12,000 ($ 250/-) for every 100 sq km. A 30 m resolution data set (100 m in practice) improves on these older data sets in terms of resolution but not necessarily in terms of the accuracy.
NASA has indicated that this is the first release and improvements to this data set will follow in the future.
You can download data from this NASA data distribution site. There is a mirror site in Japan too.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Mapping India: National Urban GIS
This project initiated by the Central Government to create a city level Geographic Information Systems (GIS) database for 152 cities and towns all over India has a lot of merit. If implemented to its full potential by individual cities, it could knock some sense in the day to day governance of Indian cities and help prepare for their planned growth.
GIS for urban applications has lagged behind GIS for natural resource application in India. There are probably many reasons for this. Institutional inertia, lack of awareness, inadequate city budgets and the high expense of creating detailed spatial datasets; all these or different combinations of these factors in different cities have prevented GIS from playing a constructive role in city planning.
The National Urban Mapping Mission looks to change all this. Funding for developing 1:10,000 and 1:2000 scale spatial datasets will be provided by the Central Government (75%) and the State Government (25%). The Survey of India which is the National Mapping agency will take charge of data creation. There will be deadlines, timelines, capacity building , performance measures... all the corporate buzzwords for successful project management are being pressed into service. The end result will be seamless city level spatial datasets, all relevant information needed to run the city just a mouse click away.
I'm excited about this mission. The experience of using GIS for city planning in Pune where I live has been to put it mildly ... disappointing. There have been various half hearted attempts to use the technology, but the mentality has been to use it to solve isolated problems. There hasn't been a concerted effort to create an integrated city level system which brings together data from various departments and then crucially to embed this GIS in the day to day work schedule of the city government.
And it is the way in which individual cities respond to this initiative that offers the greatest potential for success but also possible stumbling blocks to its effective implementation. Despite this impressive start I have to express my concerns over the long term viability of the National Urban Mapping Mission. I looked through the roadmap document available through their website. It is impressive. There is no question that the Survey of India is a reputable organization and a high quality database will be developed by them. Also importantly there is money set aside for capacity building. Each city will send a few officials to get trained in GIS.
What I want to know is whether individual cities will set aside money from its budget to fund a full time specialist staff to manage this GIS. Over the long term the responsibility of maintaining this GIS will have to come from within the city government budget. The Centre and State are unlikely to contribute any money towards hiring staff and other such sundry city governance matters. So far the way to avoid hiring additional staff has been to delegate GIS as an additional responsibility to city engineers and planners who have ten other matters to attend to.
This could work in the past because GIS played a minor role if at all in city planning. But if these soon to be available new massive datasets and attending software and hardware are to be looked after properly and used to their fullest potential, then specialists will need to be hired full time. Surrogates who will be spending most of the day in their primary job as a city engineer or planner or administrator simply won't be able to act as GIS gurus as well.
I have come across this situation before with the Maharashtra Forest Service. A few years back I had a conversation about GIS with a forest officer. He was frustrated that after spending tens of thousand of dollars on GIS software, the Maharashtra Government made no provision to hire specialists to run it! Instead Forest Officers were sent for training. Now, these are smart officers but their primary duty was to tour the district, make working plans for forest management and attend to other administrative tasks. They had no time left over for GIS work.
This Urban Mapping Mission has been to some extent forced upon cities by the Central Government. But such a top down approach is handicapped by the fact that the Central Government doesn't run the cities. The success of this mission will depend upon whether individual city governments allocate sufficient funding to and allow GIS to play a central and integrative role in the process of city management and planning. Many cities have created good development plans for growth without the use of GIS over the years. But political interference and pressure from the urban builder lobby has seen those plans fail. Technology by itself will not fix the misgovernance of Indian cities. Using GIS effectively means a change in mindset first. Given the chaotic and corrupt history of functioning of Indian city governments there is reason for some pessimism here.
The second question I had was about citizen access to all this data. Will these datasets eventually become part of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure? Will they be available to citizens for download (don't mind paying for them, I am not asking for free data, just easy access to it) thus enabling value additions that will encourage a thousand spin off applications to emerge?
That would be the forward looking and mature position to take. I hope our government thinks the same.
Tip: Spatial Sustain
GIS for urban applications has lagged behind GIS for natural resource application in India. There are probably many reasons for this. Institutional inertia, lack of awareness, inadequate city budgets and the high expense of creating detailed spatial datasets; all these or different combinations of these factors in different cities have prevented GIS from playing a constructive role in city planning.
The National Urban Mapping Mission looks to change all this. Funding for developing 1:10,000 and 1:2000 scale spatial datasets will be provided by the Central Government (75%) and the State Government (25%). The Survey of India which is the National Mapping agency will take charge of data creation. There will be deadlines, timelines, capacity building , performance measures... all the corporate buzzwords for successful project management are being pressed into service. The end result will be seamless city level spatial datasets, all relevant information needed to run the city just a mouse click away.
I'm excited about this mission. The experience of using GIS for city planning in Pune where I live has been to put it mildly ... disappointing. There have been various half hearted attempts to use the technology, but the mentality has been to use it to solve isolated problems. There hasn't been a concerted effort to create an integrated city level system which brings together data from various departments and then crucially to embed this GIS in the day to day work schedule of the city government.
And it is the way in which individual cities respond to this initiative that offers the greatest potential for success but also possible stumbling blocks to its effective implementation. Despite this impressive start I have to express my concerns over the long term viability of the National Urban Mapping Mission. I looked through the roadmap document available through their website. It is impressive. There is no question that the Survey of India is a reputable organization and a high quality database will be developed by them. Also importantly there is money set aside for capacity building. Each city will send a few officials to get trained in GIS.
What I want to know is whether individual cities will set aside money from its budget to fund a full time specialist staff to manage this GIS. Over the long term the responsibility of maintaining this GIS will have to come from within the city government budget. The Centre and State are unlikely to contribute any money towards hiring staff and other such sundry city governance matters. So far the way to avoid hiring additional staff has been to delegate GIS as an additional responsibility to city engineers and planners who have ten other matters to attend to.
This could work in the past because GIS played a minor role if at all in city planning. But if these soon to be available new massive datasets and attending software and hardware are to be looked after properly and used to their fullest potential, then specialists will need to be hired full time. Surrogates who will be spending most of the day in their primary job as a city engineer or planner or administrator simply won't be able to act as GIS gurus as well.
I have come across this situation before with the Maharashtra Forest Service. A few years back I had a conversation about GIS with a forest officer. He was frustrated that after spending tens of thousand of dollars on GIS software, the Maharashtra Government made no provision to hire specialists to run it! Instead Forest Officers were sent for training. Now, these are smart officers but their primary duty was to tour the district, make working plans for forest management and attend to other administrative tasks. They had no time left over for GIS work.
This Urban Mapping Mission has been to some extent forced upon cities by the Central Government. But such a top down approach is handicapped by the fact that the Central Government doesn't run the cities. The success of this mission will depend upon whether individual city governments allocate sufficient funding to and allow GIS to play a central and integrative role in the process of city management and planning. Many cities have created good development plans for growth without the use of GIS over the years. But political interference and pressure from the urban builder lobby has seen those plans fail. Technology by itself will not fix the misgovernance of Indian cities. Using GIS effectively means a change in mindset first. Given the chaotic and corrupt history of functioning of Indian city governments there is reason for some pessimism here.
The second question I had was about citizen access to all this data. Will these datasets eventually become part of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure? Will they be available to citizens for download (don't mind paying for them, I am not asking for free data, just easy access to it) thus enabling value additions that will encourage a thousand spin off applications to emerge?
That would be the forward looking and mature position to take. I hope our government thinks the same.
Tip: Spatial Sustain
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
A Cheap Indian GIS
GIS (Geographic Information Systems) markets have not grown as fast as it should have in India but is picking up as private companies and government start recognizing the importance of geography embedded information. The main reason has been the slow response of government agencies to the potential of GIS. Add to that are restrictions on data availability which are now being removed through the development of government supported data warehouses like the Environment Information Centre (site is down as I write this). Additionally the National Spatial Data Infrastructure is being built and that eventually will be a gateway to various national spatial data repositories.
That's great news but there is good news on the capital costs side too. The second major reason for the slow adoption of GIS in India has been the exorbitant cost of software. Software from the main GIS players like ESRI and Intergraph costs a bundle and makes it difficult for smaller organizations, NGO's, individual consultants to afford it. That's changing too. There are now in the market some excellent affordable GIS. The one I use a lot - Manifold - costs a few hundred dollars, an easier investment for small companies.
Now the latest of these low cost GIS is the one developed by the Centre of Studies in Resource Engineering IIT Bombay and distributed through Bhugol GIS Pvt Ltd, a front company (Bhugol means geography in Hindi). Its called GRAM++ and it includes a full range of GIS capabilities. Its costs about Rs 30,000 ($ 625/-) for a commercial licence and Rs 10,000/- ($ 200) for an academic licence. They have also released a web based application called the Web Gram Server. GRAM ++ also includes an image processing module, a utility most standard GIS packages lack.
At $ 625/- the commercial licence is more expensive than Manifold GIS (range $295 -$575) but still much less than the thousands of dollars you would spend on ESRI or Intergraph or MapInfo. I haven't had a chance to use and assess this software but the pricing and the advertised capabilities will be attractive to small companies and consultants.
That's great news but there is good news on the capital costs side too. The second major reason for the slow adoption of GIS in India has been the exorbitant cost of software. Software from the main GIS players like ESRI and Intergraph costs a bundle and makes it difficult for smaller organizations, NGO's, individual consultants to afford it. That's changing too. There are now in the market some excellent affordable GIS. The one I use a lot - Manifold - costs a few hundred dollars, an easier investment for small companies.
Now the latest of these low cost GIS is the one developed by the Centre of Studies in Resource Engineering IIT Bombay and distributed through Bhugol GIS Pvt Ltd, a front company (Bhugol means geography in Hindi). Its called GRAM++ and it includes a full range of GIS capabilities. Its costs about Rs 30,000 ($ 625/-) for a commercial licence and Rs 10,000/- ($ 200) for an academic licence. They have also released a web based application called the Web Gram Server. GRAM ++ also includes an image processing module, a utility most standard GIS packages lack.
At $ 625/- the commercial licence is more expensive than Manifold GIS (range $295 -$575) but still much less than the thousands of dollars you would spend on ESRI or Intergraph or MapInfo. I haven't had a chance to use and assess this software but the pricing and the advertised capabilities will be attractive to small companies and consultants.
Friday, May 1, 2009
Land Use Web Maps Through Bhoosampada; I Hope Bhuvan Is Not Like This
My post series on GIS web mapping applications for users to view, browse and query Indian spatial datasets continues. This post is on an application that allows users to view and get information about the land use and land cover of India.
Bhoosampada is the name of the application (it means earth's bounty, a reference to natural resources of India) developed under the aegis of the National Remote Sensing Centre, Hyderabad, India. Other Indian space organizations based in Dehradun, Jaipur and Bangalore have contributed to this project. It promises the user a rapid assessment of national level land use and land cover.
Right on! Entry to the application was surprisingly quick. I had to register, but the response was automated and I got my user name and password validated in a jiffy. I had given my India address. I would love to see someone from outside India try to register as a check on whether that causes the "security issues" mandarins any heartaches. If anyone has tried it do let me know.
Anyways below is the application interface.
It's a standard web mapping interface. The default view is an outline of India with the land use and land cover (LULC) overlaid. You can zoom and pan using the tools or zoom to a predetermined scale using the scale tool. The choice is from 1:1 million to 1: 200,000. Not that great I know! But apparently this is a National level LULC mapping effort that will be done on a yearly basis on a 1:250,000 scale. So for the time being users have to deal with a somewhat coarse dataset.
The LULC classes have been derived using a classification scheme on imagery from the IRS-P6 or Resourcesat-I satellite's Advanced Wide Field Sensor (AWiFS) with additional imagery input from earlier IRS series sensors. The pixel resolution is 56 m. The NRSA project manual describes in detail all the satellite image processing and classification methodology along with metadata standards.
In the layer list there are two types of layers. Those that can be queried and those that are only for display. Layers only for display are the LULC classes, water bodies and snow cover. Layers that can be queried are administrative boundaries- State, District, Taluka, District Headquarters and Major Towns.
Information on LULC is available at the State and District level. You can use the hyperlink tool to click within the State or District (after activating the layer) and a pop-up window displays the LULC statistics for 19 classes for the previous 4 years. There is a graphical representation and a per-capita and change analysis table also for viewing. Census data of the state or district is also thrown in for good measure.
This tool really forms the main information gathering mechanism of this application. This is good solid information about the country's natural and crop resources and even if aggregated only up to the district level I imagine would be very useful for regional scale projects. I would have liked to have the same information aggregated by river basin and subbasins also. A lot of projects are done using these natural boundaries as the study area.
You can select administrative units using the query builder and use the buffer function to build a buffer of specified distance. You can collect attributes of entities falling inside the buffer, but only those entities that can be queried i.e. the admin units. The query builder does not look like a finished product. I could select only one entity at a time. The logical operators that would allow users to select conditionally failed every time I tried a selection.
Now to the dynamic spatial analysis on LULC..... Its a downer since the application doesn't really allow any interesting spatial analysis on the LULC classes.
Isn't that a strange comment to make on my part? Didn't I mention above that you can click on a State or District and get the LULC stats? Isn't that doing spatial analysis?
No... it isn't! At least not from a GIS perspective.
What a user is doing online simply amounts to an information retrieval operation using the outline of a district or a state as a guide. The LULC stats have already been generated and stored and are sent to the user on request activated by a click. The hyperlink button is really that. Its a link to data that already exists. There is no data being created and assembled on the fly through spatial analysis on the LULC classes. That's the characteristic of a dynamic GIS app. In this case NRSA has prepared the LULC information bundle on each state and district in advance. They could have just created a web page with a list of state and district names and linked each name to a LULC results page. But putting a graphic front end like the Bhoosampada map viewer and letting users click on a map makes the application look more complex than it is.
What would a dynamic spatial analysis of LULC look like?
Let's say a user builds a 50 km buffer around a town selected using the query builder and that operation also retrieves the stats of LULC classes falling inside the 50 km distance. Answers to spatial questions like this one can't be anticipated and canned and requires dynamic on the fly spatial analysis on the GIS application server and then assembling those results and sending them to the user. As it stands now such dynamic queries are restricted only to selecting administrative units or building buffers around such selected entities. Maybe there were performance or other technology issues that NRSA ran into or maybe they thought users are too stupid to think of such complex analysis.
Another area in which this application fails the user and one which is even more serious than the lack of spatial queries is in the limited data sets available for overlay. I know the focus is on LULC. But displaying this layer as an isolated dataset conveys less information about why LULC variability is the way it is.
If only geographic associations had been included!
What I mean is that a country's land cover and land use spatial patterns arise through the interplay of several natural and anthropogenic influences. Rainfall, temperature, topography, soils, geology, groundwater, river basins and roads to name some, all play a role in the distribution of natural resources and how the land is being used by humans for various purposes. Addition of these layers just for overlay and attribute information purposes if not for complex analysis would lend a larger spatial context to the LULC classes and make for a more enriching and productive user experience.
Few minor quibbles. The LULC color scheme shouted out at me. I like my GIS maps colored more earth and pastel. And some design issues. In the LULC stats table you have the option of printing but no easy option to save that information in a spreadsheet format. This is tabular info, so an option to save in excel or a database should be available. Small but important details. Finishing touches in Indian government applications are always found wanting.
And finally you can request for the actual data.
But wait... the general public can get them only as hard copies and those too at a 1: 1 million scale or a 1:250,000 scale. Only scientific users of data as recognized by the NRSA can get digital copies that can be imported into a GIS.
The legacy of India's myopic and restrictive map policy lives on. We keep waiting for the day it might change..
Bhoosampada makes it easier for users to get hold of good LULC data aggregated by state and district. The LULC map layer shows regional scale variability of natural resources and cropping patterns and the stats allow yearly comparisons in the changes to the land cover. All this is a definite plus point. But in the absence of any serious spatial query capabilities and supporting data sets for overlay it resembles more an online static LULC map atlas and data warehouse than a dynamic web GIS application.
I hope Bhuvan is different.
See also: Mapping India
Bhoosampada is the name of the application (it means earth's bounty, a reference to natural resources of India) developed under the aegis of the National Remote Sensing Centre, Hyderabad, India. Other Indian space organizations based in Dehradun, Jaipur and Bangalore have contributed to this project. It promises the user a rapid assessment of national level land use and land cover.
Right on! Entry to the application was surprisingly quick. I had to register, but the response was automated and I got my user name and password validated in a jiffy. I had given my India address. I would love to see someone from outside India try to register as a check on whether that causes the "security issues" mandarins any heartaches. If anyone has tried it do let me know.
Anyways below is the application interface.
It's a standard web mapping interface. The default view is an outline of India with the land use and land cover (LULC) overlaid. You can zoom and pan using the tools or zoom to a predetermined scale using the scale tool. The choice is from 1:1 million to 1: 200,000. Not that great I know! But apparently this is a National level LULC mapping effort that will be done on a yearly basis on a 1:250,000 scale. So for the time being users have to deal with a somewhat coarse dataset.
The LULC classes have been derived using a classification scheme on imagery from the IRS-P6 or Resourcesat-I satellite's Advanced Wide Field Sensor (AWiFS) with additional imagery input from earlier IRS series sensors. The pixel resolution is 56 m. The NRSA project manual describes in detail all the satellite image processing and classification methodology along with metadata standards.
In the layer list there are two types of layers. Those that can be queried and those that are only for display. Layers only for display are the LULC classes, water bodies and snow cover. Layers that can be queried are administrative boundaries- State, District, Taluka, District Headquarters and Major Towns.
Information on LULC is available at the State and District level. You can use the hyperlink tool to click within the State or District (after activating the layer) and a pop-up window displays the LULC statistics for 19 classes for the previous 4 years. There is a graphical representation and a per-capita and change analysis table also for viewing. Census data of the state or district is also thrown in for good measure.
This tool really forms the main information gathering mechanism of this application. This is good solid information about the country's natural and crop resources and even if aggregated only up to the district level I imagine would be very useful for regional scale projects. I would have liked to have the same information aggregated by river basin and subbasins also. A lot of projects are done using these natural boundaries as the study area.
You can select administrative units using the query builder and use the buffer function to build a buffer of specified distance. You can collect attributes of entities falling inside the buffer, but only those entities that can be queried i.e. the admin units. The query builder does not look like a finished product. I could select only one entity at a time. The logical operators that would allow users to select conditionally failed every time I tried a selection.
Now to the dynamic spatial analysis on LULC..... Its a downer since the application doesn't really allow any interesting spatial analysis on the LULC classes.
Isn't that a strange comment to make on my part? Didn't I mention above that you can click on a State or District and get the LULC stats? Isn't that doing spatial analysis?
No... it isn't! At least not from a GIS perspective.
What a user is doing online simply amounts to an information retrieval operation using the outline of a district or a state as a guide. The LULC stats have already been generated and stored and are sent to the user on request activated by a click. The hyperlink button is really that. Its a link to data that already exists. There is no data being created and assembled on the fly through spatial analysis on the LULC classes. That's the characteristic of a dynamic GIS app. In this case NRSA has prepared the LULC information bundle on each state and district in advance. They could have just created a web page with a list of state and district names and linked each name to a LULC results page. But putting a graphic front end like the Bhoosampada map viewer and letting users click on a map makes the application look more complex than it is.
What would a dynamic spatial analysis of LULC look like?
Let's say a user builds a 50 km buffer around a town selected using the query builder and that operation also retrieves the stats of LULC classes falling inside the 50 km distance. Answers to spatial questions like this one can't be anticipated and canned and requires dynamic on the fly spatial analysis on the GIS application server and then assembling those results and sending them to the user. As it stands now such dynamic queries are restricted only to selecting administrative units or building buffers around such selected entities. Maybe there were performance or other technology issues that NRSA ran into or maybe they thought users are too stupid to think of such complex analysis.
Another area in which this application fails the user and one which is even more serious than the lack of spatial queries is in the limited data sets available for overlay. I know the focus is on LULC. But displaying this layer as an isolated dataset conveys less information about why LULC variability is the way it is.
If only geographic associations had been included!
What I mean is that a country's land cover and land use spatial patterns arise through the interplay of several natural and anthropogenic influences. Rainfall, temperature, topography, soils, geology, groundwater, river basins and roads to name some, all play a role in the distribution of natural resources and how the land is being used by humans for various purposes. Addition of these layers just for overlay and attribute information purposes if not for complex analysis would lend a larger spatial context to the LULC classes and make for a more enriching and productive user experience.
Few minor quibbles. The LULC color scheme shouted out at me. I like my GIS maps colored more earth and pastel. And some design issues. In the LULC stats table you have the option of printing but no easy option to save that information in a spreadsheet format. This is tabular info, so an option to save in excel or a database should be available. Small but important details. Finishing touches in Indian government applications are always found wanting.
And finally you can request for the actual data.
But wait... the general public can get them only as hard copies and those too at a 1: 1 million scale or a 1:250,000 scale. Only scientific users of data as recognized by the NRSA can get digital copies that can be imported into a GIS.
The legacy of India's myopic and restrictive map policy lives on. We keep waiting for the day it might change..
Bhoosampada makes it easier for users to get hold of good LULC data aggregated by state and district. The LULC map layer shows regional scale variability of natural resources and cropping patterns and the stats allow yearly comparisons in the changes to the land cover. All this is a definite plus point. But in the absence of any serious spatial query capabilities and supporting data sets for overlay it resembles more an online static LULC map atlas and data warehouse than a dynamic web GIS application.
I hope Bhuvan is different.
See also: Mapping India
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Mapping India Using GeoCommons
Take a look at this great web mapping application. I could plot spatial data about India in a matter of minutes and make a presentable map and then share the results with like minded citizens.
FortiusOne a geographic visualization and location intelligence company has created GeoCommons - a repository for public domain data. It is a free service. You can register as a user and browse through extensive public domain datasets. This you do through a Finder module. You can then select the dataset you are interested in and either
1) download it as a Shapefile or KML (keyhole markup language) format
2) Read details of the data
3) Plot that data on a map with Maker using a background of your choice (satellite, terrain, streetview, solid). You can thematically plot your results using different attributes from the same dataset just like you can in a GIS. But this one is for free.
You can share the results of your mapping by saving them in your account and distributing the link and by downloading the results as a KML file which you can then overlay on Google Earth or Google Maps or Virtual Earth.
Here's the result of a quick experiment that I did with some India data. I picked up the CARMA (Carbon Monitoring for Action) carbon emissions from power plants dataset and made two maps in Maker. The one below shows energy generation by power plant. The size of the dots is proportional to the amount of energy generated by individual power plants. As I mentioned you can download this dataset and get you hands on data you can use and manipulate in more sophisticated spatial analysis software, but most people don't have access to this.
The distribution of mega power plants mostly follow the coal belt. You can see the largest dots are all in the central and eastern part of the country where most of India's coal deposits are situated.
The second map uses the same dataset but plots another attribute, energy intensity. This is the amount of CO2 emitted per unit of electricity generated. It is a measure of energy efficiency.
Notice that the energy intensity values in the upper range exceed average values for coal plants in the U.S, which are about 1800-2200 lbs CO2/MWh. The CARMA data I downloaded didn't categorize plants according to fuel burnt. Gas is a cleaner fuel than coal and it's a fair guess that these largest plants are coal fired. Natural gas accounts for just about 10% of power generated in India while coal accounts for about 58%. Indian coal power plants are much more inefficient at generating power than the U.S. The National Action Plan on Climate Change has an Energy Efficiency Mission, i.e. a specific directive to improve energy efficiency. It has its work cut out in the coming years.
Now hold on before you get too excited. The datasets for the U.S are vast but for India you get a very limited stock to work with. Contributions to GeoCommons is voluntary and till date I am guessing very few organizations in India using and creating public domain data know about this site. Most of the data currently available is Census data. Why such a bias? Well, this data is freely available from the Census website (site is under construction). It is stored in a non-spatial tabular format. This data has been pulled out from this site by a user and converted into a geographic format. That's easy to do with the tabular census available with the government.
That's because the data is aggregated by administrative units. If you have already have a base map with state and other administrative boundaries (which is freely available), its easy to just attach this tabular data to the geometric data using the administrative unit name as a key. This is not possible with say natural resources data where boundaries cut across administrative units. This type of data has the geometry stored along with other attributes in a special geographic format. And getting this data from the government is a lengthy process.
So how long before we start seeing more diverse datasets on India in social mapping sites like GeoCommons. That does depend upon how quickly the government implements the National Spatial Data Infrastructure, an initiative to provide easy access to public domain spatial data. Off course the availability of this data has to be coupled with government permission to upload these data onto a third party database. Right now I am not sure if having acquired government data whether you can share it using the kind of distributive model that GeoCommons uses. The rules on this are fuzzy and I really hope the NSDI will bring in some clarification of the governments stance on value addition and data sharing and see an end to the excessively restrictive and regulatory mindset that has limited the innovative use of spatial data in this country.
You don't have to wait until the NSDI takes shape to start contributing your own data to GeoCommons. If you are an organization working with spatial datasets and want to share this data, you can right now upload your data to GeoCommons. When you do so you are agreeing to its free use by others under the Creative Commons license. Anyone will be able to use this data as long as they acknowledge the data creators which is you and the data managers which is GeoCommons.
Social mapping, citizen cartography and a data sharing mechanism to initiate civic discussions on problems that have a spatial angle to them all without an expensive GIS overhead.
Try it out.
FortiusOne a geographic visualization and location intelligence company has created GeoCommons - a repository for public domain data. It is a free service. You can register as a user and browse through extensive public domain datasets. This you do through a Finder module. You can then select the dataset you are interested in and either
1) download it as a Shapefile or KML (keyhole markup language) format
2) Read details of the data
3) Plot that data on a map with Maker using a background of your choice (satellite, terrain, streetview, solid). You can thematically plot your results using different attributes from the same dataset just like you can in a GIS. But this one is for free.
You can share the results of your mapping by saving them in your account and distributing the link and by downloading the results as a KML file which you can then overlay on Google Earth or Google Maps or Virtual Earth.
Here's the result of a quick experiment that I did with some India data. I picked up the CARMA (Carbon Monitoring for Action) carbon emissions from power plants dataset and made two maps in Maker. The one below shows energy generation by power plant. The size of the dots is proportional to the amount of energy generated by individual power plants. As I mentioned you can download this dataset and get you hands on data you can use and manipulate in more sophisticated spatial analysis software, but most people don't have access to this.
The distribution of mega power plants mostly follow the coal belt. You can see the largest dots are all in the central and eastern part of the country where most of India's coal deposits are situated.
The second map uses the same dataset but plots another attribute, energy intensity. This is the amount of CO2 emitted per unit of electricity generated. It is a measure of energy efficiency.
Notice that the energy intensity values in the upper range exceed average values for coal plants in the U.S, which are about 1800-2200 lbs CO2/MWh. The CARMA data I downloaded didn't categorize plants according to fuel burnt. Gas is a cleaner fuel than coal and it's a fair guess that these largest plants are coal fired. Natural gas accounts for just about 10% of power generated in India while coal accounts for about 58%. Indian coal power plants are much more inefficient at generating power than the U.S. The National Action Plan on Climate Change has an Energy Efficiency Mission, i.e. a specific directive to improve energy efficiency. It has its work cut out in the coming years.
Now hold on before you get too excited. The datasets for the U.S are vast but for India you get a very limited stock to work with. Contributions to GeoCommons is voluntary and till date I am guessing very few organizations in India using and creating public domain data know about this site. Most of the data currently available is Census data. Why such a bias? Well, this data is freely available from the Census website (site is under construction). It is stored in a non-spatial tabular format. This data has been pulled out from this site by a user and converted into a geographic format. That's easy to do with the tabular census available with the government.
That's because the data is aggregated by administrative units. If you have already have a base map with state and other administrative boundaries (which is freely available), its easy to just attach this tabular data to the geometric data using the administrative unit name as a key. This is not possible with say natural resources data where boundaries cut across administrative units. This type of data has the geometry stored along with other attributes in a special geographic format. And getting this data from the government is a lengthy process.
So how long before we start seeing more diverse datasets on India in social mapping sites like GeoCommons. That does depend upon how quickly the government implements the National Spatial Data Infrastructure, an initiative to provide easy access to public domain spatial data. Off course the availability of this data has to be coupled with government permission to upload these data onto a third party database. Right now I am not sure if having acquired government data whether you can share it using the kind of distributive model that GeoCommons uses. The rules on this are fuzzy and I really hope the NSDI will bring in some clarification of the governments stance on value addition and data sharing and see an end to the excessively restrictive and regulatory mindset that has limited the innovative use of spatial data in this country.
You don't have to wait until the NSDI takes shape to start contributing your own data to GeoCommons. If you are an organization working with spatial datasets and want to share this data, you can right now upload your data to GeoCommons. When you do so you are agreeing to its free use by others under the Creative Commons license. Anyone will be able to use this data as long as they acknowledge the data creators which is you and the data managers which is GeoCommons.
Social mapping, citizen cartography and a data sharing mechanism to initiate civic discussions on problems that have a spatial angle to them all without an expensive GIS overhead.
Try it out.
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