There are various large companies developing spatial bookmarking techniques and providing a service to public and organizations. We could have other people develop similar tools even in the energy resource mapping sector. This is not a threat for this project but the key is to successfully develop a revenue model based on this project and sustain the same after the pilot project is complete.
The successful implementation of this project depends primarily on two aspects: 1) proper development the required tools in a timely manner and
2) capacity building and collecting the data pertaining to the resources. On a longer term, the data may be outdated unless maintained by the community – this depends on how other energy related projects (or projects of other sectors such as education, health and rural infrastructure) use this data and enhance it.
Engaging the community and sustaining the interaction of the community is an important aspect which has been taken care of in the Methodology for development and implementation based on successful communities of stakeholders. JANASTU is involved in developing ICT tools for various NGOs for social development projects and is involved in a IDRC project for Tsunami Rehabilitation efforts using KM tools and GIS to coordinate the efforts of NGOs. Similarly, SSAEL has the experience in remote village electrification in Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram and Chattisgarh over the last three years and has the field experience to understand the ground realities of achieving development goals through provision of energy services. These lessons learnt from these experiences will be useful in facing the challenges of providing support services for RVEP and other GVEP Partners' scale up projects.
On a longer term, the data may be outdated unless maintained and updated by the community – this depends on how other energy related projects (or projects of other sectors such as education, health and rural infrastructure) use this data and enhance it. The training workshops intend to develop the capacity of government officials from other sectors to plan and execute their programs around the hub of energy services provided for the rural community. Thus the multisectoral coordination and interaction enabled through web based GIS and KM tools it may be possible to achieve integrated and sustainable rural development.
India lacks or restricts a lot of the geo-data that is accessible in other countries (e.g. the US). This has been by choice, with national security is often cited as a reason. Will you have trouble sharing this data on village locations and infrastructure in a free and
public domain?
We do not foresee any trouble in sharing the geo-data that would available under the project as much of it is already available to the public through Survey of India maps and National Remote Sensing Agency (NRSA). In the proposed project, current restrictions in map policy are not a limiting factor, since the level of map resolution / detail that will be presented (or needed for the purpose) is already permitted by the existing policy in India. Maps similar to those intended for this project are already available in a few online spaces, including in projects funded by multilateral agencies (e.g. Indic Trans, Mumbai Freemap).
Creating data involves accounting for error and accuracy. National map accuracy standards in the US stipulate that data created for government use in maps and GIS, must not be in error by more than 1/30 inch for scales larger than 1:20,000 and 1/50 for scales
1:20000 or smaller. Will the data you create be of professional quality or is it more for general information dissemination?
Data that will be created under the project will be of professional quality that can be used by various stakeholders cited above for policy planning, program implementation and monitoring development work. Moreover, the Data will be of commercial utility. The data would be spatially bookmarked on GIS maps with required resolution for the purpose. Data / Maps would be obtained from the existing sources such as Bureau of Census, Survey of India and NRSA and the data / maps would have the requisite accuracy provided by them. Accuracy of the base map follows directly from the source from which it is obtained and is therefore as directed by the government's specifications. The GPS coordinates and resource mapping (carried out by SSAEL as part of the remote village surveys) will be located on the base map.
For the website, will the user need to only view data in the form of a map image or will the user need to query the underlying data and possibly alter, correct, or add to the data? Mapserver doesn't allow for WFS (Web Feature Service) which is the sharing of and
manipulation of the underlying data by the user, and only displays the underlying data in map as an image format (jpg). On the other hand, WFS cannot be viewed with a normal web browser like IE or Firefox, and would need a GIS program like ArcExplorer. Please
explain.
We would be using a custom map server (Mapunity - www.mapunity.org ) that will disseminate maps as tiles (juxtaposed images of the region of interest at different zoom levels); this provides higher efficiencies than WFS servers, since the processing needed for rendering the map at the desired pan/zoom combination is minimal. The client interface will be based on a popular and publicly available map Application Programming Interface such as the GoogleMap API. Data can be shared through popular browsers for use by a number of applications. Content/attribute information that is spatially bookmarked can be edited online through Pantoto (an open source web server for building online communities / knowledge management, www.pantoto.com ) which works with all popular Internet browsers. This will be layered on top of the base map. For the base data itself, revisions will be performed through open-source web-enabled (but not through the browser) GIS software such as uDig.
(http://udig.refractions.net/).
