The Indian Govt. is going to attract foreign direct investment (FDI) in the GIS and aerial mapping sectors to prepare an exhaustive database for the entire country. Union Minister of State for Science, Technology and Ocean Development, Kapil Sibal said that opening the sector for FDI would help speed up the area mapping work in the country.

‘‘The map database, being prepared by using GIS, would help tackle future challenges more effectively and improve India’s performance in areas like agriculture and infrastructure,’’ said Sibal. http://cities.expressindia.com

Just with the click of a mouse, information will be available to the babus to take decisions as the J-K government has signed a MoU of over Rs 7 crore with the Department of Space to start mapping of different districts of the state. Once the mapping is over, computers at the offices will reel out all information about the district.
http://www.expressindia.com

In effort to increase spending on public health, the Indian Government has set up a National Commission on Macroeconomics and Health (NCMH). The commission will assess the cost and means of funding a comprehensive health package, especially to provide free treatment for the poor population.

Set up on April 1, 2004, the commission has been set up in response to the Jeffrey Sachs Report submitted to WHO two years ago, which advocated an increase in the health expenditure in developing countries. A study undertaken by NCMH from June to October 2004, covering the districts of Kozhikode (Kerala), Khamam (Andhra Pradesh), Jalna (Maharasthtra), Ujjain (Madhya Pradesh, Udaipur (Rajasthan), Varanasi (Uttar Pradesh), Vaishali (Bihar) and Nadia in West Bengal, mapped the private and public health facilities in the country. The GIS design has been made by National Informatics Centre.”
http://www.expresshealthcaremgmt.com

HCL has been selected by the Bangalore Development Authority (BDA) to design, develop, implement and support an Integrated Management Information System to automate the business processes in its various departments. The project encompasses interfacing with the present IT infrastructure at Bangalore Development Authority with respect to the existing applications, which are OCMS (an Application for Online Complaint Management), IVRS (Interactive Voice Response System, an application with voice response capabilities for complaint management), GIS - Geographical Information System and e-KIOSK (an application made available to public through KIOSKS set up at various locations throughout the city)
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com

Commercial licensing of businesses is being centralised with a single-window system being set up at the Doha Ministry of Economy and Commerce.

The new system is being installed to cut red tape and improve efficiency so that businesses are not affected due to unwanted delays. Plans are afoot to depute employees from the various ministries to man the proposed single-window commercial licensing outlet at the economy ministry. A decision is expected to be taken shortly between the civic and economy ministries. The Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Agriculture has also developed a GIS through which its concerned officials would be able to pinpoint the location of a business, which applies for a commercial licence. Renewals of these licences as well as inspection for health clearance would be conducted through the GIS system. http://www.thepeninsulaqatar.com

FEWA (Federal Electricity and Water Authority), UAE has decided to implement their enterprise GIS application based on AED-SICAD’s ArcFM UT and ESRI’s ArcGIS. The ESRI distributor and AED-SICAD business partner GISTEC will implement the network information system jointly with MAPS, which is responsible for data collection. The decision came after an extensive tendering phase, where all major network information system provider were present.

GISTEC along with its partners MAPS & AED-SICAD will provide technical consultancy to establish a strategic GIS Center for FEWA with the necessary hardware, software, data etc. The GIS center in conjunction with the current SCADA center will help to enhance the current technical maintenance and management of FEWA’s electrical and water assets and to optimize resources in terms of time, personnel and support material during its activities.
http://www10.giscafe.com

NAVTEQ, the providers of digital maps for vehicle navigation and location- based solutions of US, has added new roads and updated attributes and geometry on existing roads in its maps of the following middle eastern countries: Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. The updated maps of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates were released in Q4 2004, and the updated map of Saudi Arabia was released in Q1 2005 to NAVTEQ’s direct customers.
http://www.navteq.com

Municipalities throughout Lebanon are getting a helping hand in their ight against corruption and inefficiency from a new program that will generate computerized “maps” of information. Head of Jounieh municipality’s IT department, Fawzi Baroud, said: “Think of a map of Jounieh where you can zoom in on a house and find out everything about it, from taxes owed, to its size, to number of residents and so on.” He added: “It is basically the computerization of the municipalities. This is an important step towards efficienct control of municipality activities.”

As part of the program, a municipal GIS will be implemented over the next two years in 20 municipalities to create computerized “mapping” of some 70 layers of physical, financial and taxpayer data. The GIS has already been implemented in Jounieh as a pilot project, where inspectors are evaluating “pending municipal transactions for citizens as well as overdue transactions.”
http://www.dailystar.com.lb

The government’s information database project, part of the peace-restoring programmes in the country’s deep South, using GIS is almost complete, its project manager, Prasert Kaewpetch, said recently. The remaining 20 percent still to be collected are mainly details on the Islamic religious schools in Thailand’s three southern border provinces of Yala, Pattani and Narathiwat.

Most of the existing database has been supplied by the Ministries of Education and Interior, he said. A working panel is scheduled to visit the three provinces on 21 April to collect more information for the project.

The database with information on all education-culture-religions-related activities of local people is expected to help the government deal more effectively with the violence problem in the deep South, Mr. Prasert said.
http://www.mcot.org

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has prepared an atlas on the areas affected by the 26 December 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia, which has proven to be very useful to FAO teams and to Italian and other European officials and non governmental organizations working in the devastated zones. The Tsunami Atlas was prepared using images collected from FAO databases and completed by major spatial data sources on the web, which includes raw satellite images, interpreted satellite images, topographic maps, thematic maps and geo-statistics.

The Atlas will soon be distributed widely in hard copy throughout the tsunami-affected countries, including national ministries, UN agencies and non-governmental organizations.
http://biz.yahoo.com

GfK MACON of Germany has checked and updated the digital maps of Europe. This involves the administrative and postal maps of Germany, Austria and Switzerland. They are available in the formats of all standard GIS. The updated map reveals that in eastern Germany in particular, the number of communities has been changing constantly since reunification, but not in any uniform manner. The state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania alone has 128 changes to record, while Saxony-Anhalt has 94. There was a reduction of six in the number of communities in Thuringia while overall in Germany, a total of 223 communities were dissolved. Changes in the communities usually result in changes to the postcode areas.
http://www.gfk-macon.com

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Review Board has approved the launch of the Geospatial Semantic Web (GSW) Interoperability Experiment (IE). The Interoperability Experiment will take several important steps towards the development of the Geospatial Semantic Web, where discovery, query, and consumption of geospatial content are based on formal semantic specification. The GSW will enable the meaning of geographic queries to be easily shared among different software systems and online services.

Many pieces of the GSW puzzle have been under development in the last several years. This experiment aims to augment existing Web focused mapping specifications (OpenGIS Web Feature Service and Filter Encoding) with a semantic query capability, through the definition of an ontology (a hierarchical structuring of knowledge) for the geospatial intelligence community. The experiment will explore an appropriate distributed architecture to support specific use scenarios. http://portal.opengeospatial.org