Our sustainable future, empowered by the geospatial ecosystem
Project the value, enhance adoption, evolve understanding of geospatial knowledge for social, economic and environmental development in the Digital Age
The ‘Geospatial Way’ is the future. It is the most efficient and effective way to collect, process, integrate and utilize information for overall global, national and individual development. Geospatial Knowledge is the result, enabling us to identify, contextualize and understand the many challenges and opportunities facing society within a geographic context. However, realizing the potential of this future state, particularly for developing countries, requires three key enablers – partnerships, knowledge sharing and capacity building.
With the objective to project the value proposition of Geospatial Knowledge, forecast its relevance and connectivity with fundamentals of next generation economy and society and to redefine the role of stakeholders: government, industry and civil society, the campaign on Advancing Role of Geospatial Knowledge Infrastructure in World Economy, Society and Environment was launched in January 2020. This is a three-year long project, looking at assessment in a broader frame for the first year, detailed strategy development in the second year and transformation in the third year.
A select set of 20 countries will be chosen by the partners to hold in-country roundtable meetings with the geospatial ecosystem stakeholders to deep dive into understanding the contexts and readiness for supporting a geospatial knowledge infrastructure. Discussions will revolve around current geospatial data infrastructure, policies, institutional capacities, industrial capacity and user capacity. The roundtable meetings will also explore various possible partnership networks, including government to government, government to private, government to multilateral and private to multilateral agencies.
Apart from the roundtable meetings, the team will also have several other one-on-one meetings as part of the primary inputs for the final report.
Training course on Advancing Role of Geospatial Knowledge Infrastructure in World Economy, Society and Environment will be held at a global scale.
Mapping/Geospatial agencies have traditionally worked in-house or through specific project contracts to deliver mapping, data and data services. Increasingly geospatial data and its derived geospatial knowledge are core to many aspects of digital society, and single agencies cannot deliver efficiently or effectively on their own. Indeed they may not survive on their own and need to find new business models and partnerships, including those that allow transformation in outputs in resource constrained environments.
A state-of-the-art showcase on Geospatial Knowledge Infrastructure will be displayed at GeoSmart India 2020. The display will highlight the concept of Geospatial Knowledge, its relationship with the 4th Industrial Age technologies, including Big Data, Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Robotics etc. All partners will contribute case studies and good practices revolving around various themes and aspects of GKI highlighting the social, economic and environmental impact of GKI. The aim of the showcase will be to communicate a wholistic vision of Geospatial Knowledge Infrastructure to the larger community, which stimulates innovation around and adoption of GKI.
The final output of the campaign will be a report detailing GKI as a concept:
