Building a Mountain GIS Portal for Sustainable Mountain Development

Abstract

abstractOnce a science of only a few insiders, Geographic Information System (GIS) has now become a mainstream IT application that affects our daily lives in many ways. The value of Geo-IT in addressing various issues on sustainable development has been well recognized. One of the reasons for the hindrance of the real Geo-IT applications is the lack of proper data infrastructure and sharing mechanisms in the developing world. Many countries are working on developing national spatial data infrastructures (NSDI) to deal with various components necessary to facilitate spatial data and its sharing to a broad user base. In this context, the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) has been working on spatial data infrastructure at a regional level in the Hindu Kush-Himalayan (HKH) region to develop a common framework for sharing data and knowledge for application of GIS in sustainable mountain development. A mountain GIS portal has been developed using the latest GIS and the Internet mapping technologies. The portal, developed to share GIS resources such as metadata, spatial data, maps, application methodologies, publications and training materials, will certainly reinforce the NSDI efforts in the countries of the HKH. ICIMOD in partnership with national institutions is developing country-based portals in a similar framework that will be a part of the larger network at the regional level. It is envisaged that the development of this distributed network with a building block approach will ultimately form spatial data infrastructure for both national and regional use. Visit http://www.icimod-gis.net.np.