How to select the right GIS service provider February 20, 2009

Geographical information is on your fingertips now-a-days. The internet opens before you unending possibilities. The only task you have is to select the right service provider for you. But how?

There are some criteria to select the best or the right GIS service provider for your GIS requiements.

Find out your business needs

The first and the foremost thing is to identify the service you need. Now there are companies which do all the work that come under the category GIS and some do specialize in certain services. I would suggest that you go to the companies that have specialized in the services you would like to be done by them.

Reliability

Secondly, find out how reliable is the company. Some companies boast about their work and their efficiency in hyperbolic terms. But need not be completely true. So check out whether the GIS service provider you choose is trustworthy and efficient enough to carry out your work with right manpower and technological resources required.

Quality

You can always ask the GIS service provider for a sample job to be done for you. This will give you an idea of the quality of the work they provide. Choosing the company or opting out is now more easy for you, isn’t it?

Compare prices

If you have found more than one service provider who would give you the same quality work you need, well, make a comparison of their service costs. It is needless to say that you can choose the one that offers you some cost advantages.

Work Capacity

Don’t forget to do some spying on the infrastructure of the company. If you are satisfied about the technology, the manpower, the experience and expertise of the company, there is no looking back. You have selected the right GIS service provider!

Regards

SBL GEOMATICS

By : RARIMA N S

Modern GIS! An overview February 20, 2009

GIS has become somewhat mandatory. Our day-to-day myriad activities of life cannot go on without  GIS.

Developed recently for the purpose of using and studying geographic information, geography underpins GIS and is the key to understanding it. It expresses and describes the locations of objects and features relating to the distribution and patterns of physical and human features that exist on the Earth’s surface.

Modern GIS

Before the advancement of modern GIS, analysis procedures would have been manually undertaken using transparent overlays or run through very slow and incompetent machines with far less power than today’s machines. GIS in the past mainly meant the information obtained from maps.

The critical advantage of modern GIS is that all the functionality for working with manifold sets of geographic data are assembled and automated within one piece of software with improved efficiency and speed.

The input, storage and display of geographical information are now realized in a computer and hence the features and themes can be manipulated, combined and analyzed to generate new information.

Various  GIS software packages are available with different functionality and interfaces. ESRI is the world’s most popular GIS software package.

Some common examples of GIS

Geographic information is as wide and varied from socio-economic or demographic data to physical and environmental data, treated as separate l ‘themes’ of similar types of information. Eg: Physical features or phenomena such as rivers, roads, forests, earthquakes, volcanoes, erosion, floods, vegetation etc. and Human features or phenomena such as population, migration, electoral territories, poverty, religion, health etc.

One such theme could relate to all the ‘rivers’ in a country. The physical features can include flooding and pollution. The location element is the postcode.

One of the main sources of ‘human’ geographic information is the Census. It records a large number of variables about every person in the a country including employment, housing and health. The geography element of it is the location of where people live.

Essentially, geographic information states WHAT is WHERE which needs to record these two elements somehow. Data can be captured from aerial photography, satellite images, field samples, land surveying, population censuses, global positioning systems (GPS) and government administrative records among others.

For combining geographic information themes, geography or location is used as the common denominator or the link. It has the potential to generate new information on patterns and relationships between multiple sets of geographic information that would otherwise be missed, and to aid in answering more complex questions or decision-making.

A typical example is Jon Snow’s investigation of Cholera in Victorian London in 1854. He identified the locations of incidences of Cholera against the location of water pumps, and noticed its gathering pattern around the Broad Street water pump. He identified the contaminated source and created the beginning of modern epidemiology. A map of just the water pumps or incidences of Cholera alone would have been of little value.

Again take the example of flood risk maps where the combined geographic information on the locations of properties and the locations of flood zones can help to identify properties at risk of flooding. This combined information is of huge value to environmental groups and insurance companies providing new information that would not be detectable otherwise.

The benefits of modern GIS

Modern GIS has several advantages over the old techniques of map-making and information gathering. Some of modern GIS are:

• Can cover large study areas (the whole world if necessary)

• Can deal with larger amounts of data

• Can easily select any sub-study area

• Can cope with frequent and infinite edits and changes

• More powerful and resistant to damage

• Quicker and more efficient

• Requires less person, time and money

The Census is the most familiar examples of how GIS can store and display a number of large datasets for the entire country quickly and easily. Without the help of GIS, you would have had to search manually through records on your computer on telephone staff at the Census office to get information about your area of interest.

With GIS, data for any area can be accessed quickly and easily according to a location. We can now store and show maps and aerial photographs covering the whole of a country. For example, Multimap through which you can know exactly where every town and village in the UK was, you would be unable to provide the level of information that Multimap is able to do in just a few seconds. Essentially, you are able to customise your data to suit your needs.

GIS software has a large variety of tools of varying levels of complexity. Shown below are some core standard functions common to GIS software packages.

• Query: Ask questions of feature attributes like: where is _? What’s the nearest_? What intersects with _?

• Mapping and cartography: Visualize features and edit symbology and colours to create an output map with title, scale bar, north arrow etc.

• Select: Classify features and their attributes that meet some criteria.

• Distance: Estimate the distance between features.

• Buffers: Rings drawn around features at a particular distance from the features.

• Overlay: The display of diverse layers of information at one location.

• Clip: Makes an input layer to the size and extent of a selected layer.

• Merge: Merges multiple layers into a single layer.

• Raster analysis: A complete separate suite of tools for raster analysis which includes classifying cells, deriving aspect and slope, mosaicing and calculating new cell values among many others.

• 3D: Data can be analyzed with ‘height’ in 3-dimensions for powerful visualization

Who uses GIS and Why?

GIS has evolved into a technology that is used by a huge number of industries and agencies to help plan, design, engineer, build and maintain information infrastructures that effects our everyday lives.

Use of GIS in different industry

Forestry: Inventory and management of resources

Police: Crime mapping to target resources

Epidemiology: To link clusters of disease to sources

Transport: Monitoring routes

Utilities: Managing pipe networks

Oil: Monitoring ships and managing pipelines

Central and local government: Evidence for funding and policy (eg.) deprivation

Health: Planning services and health impact assessments

Environment agencies: Identifying areas of risk from e.g. flood

Emergency departments e.g. ambulance: Planning quickest routes

Retail: Store location

Marketing: Locating target customers

Military: Troop movement

Mobile phone companies: Locating masts

Land ReGIStry: Recording and managing land and property

Estate agents: Locating properties that match certain criteria

Insurance: Identifying risk e.g. properties at risk of flooding

Agriculture: Analyzing crop yields

Regards

SBL GEOMATICS

BY: RARIMA N S

Scope of GIS Tenders February 6, 2009

Outsourcing is in the air now. Most of the GIS companies outsource their georeferencing work to Geomatics service providers who undertake their projects offering lower costs and better quality work. When the number of such service providers increase every minute, how will you select the appropriate one to suit your business requirements?

Tenders! Internet and newspaper media are crowded with such business tenders currently. You will surely navigate to the right service provider browsing through them.

Just have a look at this tender for a GIS project!

‘The major aim of this project is to implement an efficient and cost effective mapping system for the expansion of the railroad’

You are expected to:

- make GIS-related data accessible to all the staff

- a detailed mapping of the terrain (including utility and contour)

- link all datasets with respect to the geographical components and link them to the Internet’

Going through this, you get an idea of the requirements, the specifications and the pre-requisites of the project.

If you have the right technology with skilled personnel in the specific job they ask for, you can move ahead and make a bid positively.

Tenders open before you immense opportunities to select the right GIS service provider within your estimated expense limits. You can also make an easy choice of the company that has the required technical and professional expertise.

Moreover, you can be stationed at your place and the right service provider will come in search of you with the most competitive prices.

For the service providers, tenders help to make smart bids which are comparatively lower to their competitors. They also come to know about the changing trends, needs, and services in the very innovative GIS arena through these tenders.

It is a highly aggressive world outside which is completely business-minded. Tenders naturally become the catalysts to these high-spirited business motives.

Regards

SBL GEOMATICS
Article by: RARIMA N S

How GIS helps in finding location of migratory birds? February 5, 2009

While  spring, flocks of migratory wading birds arrive from their natural habitat, which would be usually intolerably cool during winter, to a critical non-breeding habitat on the tropical places.

Protection of these migratory birds is a concern that needs some attention. Some of these birds from northern hemisphere fly more than 20,000 km a year in search of a suitable dwelling place for survival during the winter season.

The use of GIS and remote sensing technology can be used as an integral part to trace the migrating location of these birds from field mapping to reporting of the location.

One tip to find the birds of migration is to identify their food habit. This would give an idea of their prospective migrating location with regard to the availability of the specific food.

For instance, if we take the birds that usually migrate from Siberia to the tropical North coast of Australia. These migratory birds feed on small animals that live in mud such as crabs, snails and worms. These birds naturally migrate to the area of low muddy lands of Australia to feed and refill their energy for their journey back to their natural habitat.

Using compatible and innovative GPS units and enough field staff, samples can be collected from various points of the expected area of migration by producing progress maps and occasional species maps. By these procedures, even the presence of any new species in the area also can be identified.

To cite another example, some migratory birds have time and again halted in Malaysia during their roosting season that usually lasts from November to March because of its Matang Mangrove Forest.

The arrival of these migratory birds was observed by The Department of Wildlife and National Parks and they have decided to create a GIS database in order to study the biodiversity and sustainability of migratory birds.

Finally, they made a GIS database for the migratory birds and conducted an overall analysis on the captured data. The methodology run from need assessment to data collection, database development and system integration. This finally resulted in an analysis on the trends of bird migration, the properties of ecosystem, environment sensitivity analysis and spatial statistic analysis on the distribution of the migratory birds.

As already mentioned, the resultant migratory bird’s database contain statistical results on the trend of bird migration which in turn helped to identify the endangered species of migratory birds. When the endangered species are classified, measures and procedures for the maintenance of the mangrove areas are taken.

• The database of the migratory birds with reference to the diversity and sustainability of the birds can been developed using ArcView 3.2, MapObject 2.0, Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0, AutoCadMap 2.0 and S-Plus 2000.

Thanks and regards

SBL GEOMATICS

Article by : RARIMA N S