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Indian Society of the Geomatics.

Space Applications Centre

Ahmedabad

Compared to many other professional societies, the Indian Society of Geomatics is a young one. It was formed in 1993 by a group of professionals drawn from academia, government and industry to address the topic of Geomatics technologies and applications in a holistic manner. It has a strength of about 221 members who are mainly Life members and Patrons. There are a few Annual, Student and Sustaining members. The Society is registered under the Societies Act and the Bombay Public Trusts Act and has its registered office at the Space Applications Centre, Ahmedabad. The Society has been well supported by Government and Industry for which we are very grateful.

The society aims at advancement, disseminating and application of the knowledge of Geomatics. A number of activities have been carried out in this direction. The society brings out a newsletter regularly. I am happy that the newsletter contains good articles and give information on events of interest to the members. I would like to congratulate Dr Baldev Sahai, the Chief editor and other members of the Editorial board for this. Apart from this there have been popular lectures and training courses. The last Annual conference was held at Dehradun on the theme Geomatics for disaster management. The society has its web site established on Nov 1998 and was adjudged the web site for Dec 1998 by the hosts.

Geomatics, which primarily deals with spatial data management along with other data, is gaining application in various fields ranging from resource planning to motoring. The variety of applications to which Geomatics technology can be put to use only depends on the imagination and ingenuity driven by the need. There are many technologies, which contributed to the rapid progress of Geomatics. These according to me are:

• Satellite data with resolution approaching aerial imagery
• Global position system (GPS), which could give location accurate to a few cm. depending on the techniques used
• Digital photogrammetry
• GIS using powerful computer to manipulate and model so as to convert data into information
• Information super highway which makes connectivity faster and easy

As you are all aware the first space photograph of the earth was transmitted by Explorer-6 in August 1959. Space based remote sensing began with the launch of the experimental weather satellite TIROS-1 by USA on 1st April 1960. However, watershed in earth observation from space began with the launch of Landsat-1 in 1972. The next milestone was the launch of SPOT in 1986, which apart from its high-resolution (10 m) imaging capability also provided a means for height measurement. The launch of IRS-1A in 1988 put India in the world map of operational satellite remote sensing data producers. Currently IRS-1C/1D provides the highest spatial resolution civilian data.

While all these efforts were primarily funded by Government agencies, a number of commercial systems have been proposed during the last five years. They are primarily aiming at providing 1 m. data in panchromatic and a few meters in multi-spectral. Even though as per the original planning many of them should have been in orbit by 1998 only one satellite - Early bird-1 of Earth Watch was launched in 1998, which was built without government funding. Unfortunately it failed after launch. There are a number of players in the field to produce 1-m. class of imageries. These include

    Space Imaging          Ikonos-1
    Earth watch              Quick bird-1
    ORBIMAGE              Orb View 3a
    West Indian Space    EROS-A

While these are operating in the VNIR region, system studies are going on to have 1-m. SAR data, which have all weather capability.

What is the motivation for having 1-m. data. Why this magic no. 1 meter. The first consideration is US Govt. approval of commercial sale of 1-m. data, of course with certain controls - called shutter control. These data, which is near-spy-quality, will have the major customer from US National Image and Mapping Agency (NIMA). That is an assured customer.

These satellites are also capable of producing stereo pairs along track thus getting height information accurate better than a couple of meters. As far as Geomatics family is concerned, we will be getting imagery approaching aerial quality, which could be used for variety of applications.

Another area, which has made technological advancement to the benefit of Geomatics community, is the position determination. With Kinematics GPS one can now have positional accuracy of a couple of cm. Thus precise location information is possible in a very short time compared to conventional mensuration.

Let me share some of my thoughts on how Geomatics can take deep root for national development. We should have a strong industry backbone, which can carry out value addition. They should not look at the government aided projects as the main activities. Instead they should find out new avenues and problems, which could be tackled with this new technology. Can we be imaginative to make an impact at individual level, as the communications do now? Then the whole technology will have a phenomenal growth.

We should develop the human resource that can meet the demand for tomorrow. I urge the members to find means and ways to popularise this technology at the student level and induce interest in them.

I hope this workshop will give an opportunity for interactions amongst the professionals to use Geomatics to improve the quality of life of our fellow countrymen.