“In the past we were not connected,” said Muhunthan Canagey, chief executive of ICTA. “The new government’s aim is to get all state buildings linked across so we could work together.”

Spatial data of the type produced by GIS (Geographical Information Systems) technology is used by many agencies, Canagey told a GIS user forum.

Tenders have closed for the project to link 3,500 state buildings with 100 megabyte connectivity to each other and to an information back bone of 100 gigabytes across all 25 districts, he said.

“This will ensure information stored in one building can be passed across to other organisations and citizens can also access it,” he said.

Sri Lanka is home to an estimated 15,000 GIS professionals and users with the technology having been used in the country for over two and a half decades in both the private and public sectors for civilian and military applications.

The conference was organized by GIS Solutions (Private) Limited, a unit of Justin Time Group which distributes the ArcGIS platform developed by Environmental Systems Research Institute, USA known by the acronym ESRI.

GIS has been in use in Sri Lanka since the 1990s for mapping and other applications using the geospatial data whose use is now becoming popular for building ‘smart communities’ where data is used to improve the quality of life for citizens.

(Economy Next)