A new wave of technological innovation is allowing us to capture, store, process and display an unprecedented amount of geographical and spatial information about Society and a wide variety of environmental and cultural phenomena. Much of this information is “spatial” – that is, it refers to a coordinate system and is representable in map form. Geo-Information and Communication Technology (Geo-ICT) encompasses synergy and convergence of various modern technologies dealing with various aspects of spatial data management including: data acquisition, data assimilation, data analysis, information generation, decision support, and information dissemination. Geographic Information System (GIS), remote sensing, Global Positioning System (GPS) and web technologies are the chief technologies falling under Geo-ICT. Current and accurate spatial data must be readily available to contribute to local, state and national development and contribute to economic growth, environmental quality and stability, and social progress. Over the past years, the Uttarakhand Space Application Centre has produced a rich “base” of map information through systematic surveys on various natural resources by using remote sensing data. Further, with the availability of precision, high-resolution satellite images, data enabling the organization of GIS, combined with the GPS, the accuracy and information content of these spatial datasets or maps is extremely high.
Having mandated with the responsibility of creating, storing, analyzing, retrieving and supply of the spatial data to all the user departments of Uttarakhand Government, U-SAC plans to establish an Uttarakhand State Geo-ICT programme on multidimensional Geo-spatial data analysis and Geo-portal application on the pattern of various State Geo-ICT applications developed by State Remote Sensing Centres. The objective of the project would be to make accessible organized geo-spatial data to facilitate use of this data in the planning process of various line Departments. U-SAC would collect, generate and digitize the spatial data, make it compatible, inter-operable and accessible to various departments through the SWAN being developed in the state or such communication network. This would be based upon a network of servers that would provide access to organized spatial data to the authorized departments. This project is planned with a broader objective to create a Digital Uttarakhand Scenario.