Crowd-Sourcing For Societal GIS with Open Data Kit (ODK) an Indian perspective

Presenter : Bala Sankar .V

Type:  Oral

Indian Government is taking a lead in Geographic Information System (GIS) through their popular programs, ‘SMART City’, and ‘AMRUT City’ schedules. http:// www.SMARTcitiesprojects.com/ list-of-nominate-cities-developed-as-SMART-cities AMRUT cities/. From 2006, National Urban Information System (NUIS) for Generation of multi-scale (1:10,000, 1:2000, 1:1000). Geospatial Database for Cities is initiated by Ministry of Urban Development (MOUD). The project has been executed by several agencies including, Survey of India (SOI) and National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC/ISRO). This helped generate Geospatial data to help Master Plan/Development, Plan Preparation, Transportation Plan, Urban Site suitability analysis and Urban Environmental Planning. Thus NUIS initiated creation of Geospatial Database at 10k scale with layers, Urban Land use, Geology, Geomorphology, Physiography and Soil. Forest, City/town boundaries and Settlement Location Names are also added to help ‘SMART and AMRUT Cities’. Milestones and Timelines for SMART and AMRUT Cities includes ‘Preparation of Master Plan using GIS’ (http://amrut.gov.in/writereaddata/AMRUT%20Guidelines%20.pdf). Master plans for all the SMART and AMRUT cities prepared on GIS is a very welcome step and will facilitate administration at large.

With 220 million users of Smart phones, India is second in the world (http:// www.thehindu.com/news/cities/mumbai/business/with-220mn-users-india is-now-worlds-second biggest-smartphone-market/article8186543.ece). ‘Swach Bharath’, a cleanliness drive launched by Honourable Prime Minister, also launched a Smartphone GIS data collection App (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details id=com.swachhbharat&hl=en) setting the trend of crowd-sourcing Geospatial data for societal use. Geographic Information, of ‘SMART and AMRUT Cities’, is dynamic and needs regular updation. ‘Crowd-Sourcing’, of Geospatial data can be provided by using smart phones with well designed, ‘Forms (of Questionnaire)’ to a large extent.

‘Open Data Kit’, popular with the accronym ODK provides a dependable source for crowd sourcing (Point) Geospatial data for societal use. In this paper ODK is dealt clearly right from installation on a desktop computer to, designing a ‘Query form’, for Geospatial data collection to installing mobile Application on a smart phone with, ‘Query form’. Populating crowd sourced point data on Qgis and inserting the same into WEB-GIS is also explained with a view to mentor those who wish to pursue Geospatial data for society. The Geospatial point data can be used for attributing information on SMART and AMRUT cities after validation.