Slashgeo

All Points Blog links to a The Hindu article informing us India and Russia will jointly develop the GLONASS-K GPS satellites. From the short article: ""Under the space co-operation agreements signed during President Vladimir Putin's India visit, both countries will jointly develop new generation GLONASS-K satellite for the GLONASS global positioning system, which will function parallelly with the American GPS," Indian Ambassador Kanwal Sibal said. Addressing an internet press conference last evening, he said Russia intends to operationalise GLONASS by 2010 by completing the cluster of 24 satellites."

Here's several geospatial-related stories which may interest you. I generally try to avoid such disparate mashup of stories but that's my way of catching up interesting August stories which haven't been discussed on Slashgeo. Let's start with this nice SRTM relief mashup with Google Maps from this list from the FGT blog. Then there's testing of no-GPS navigation systems roadsigns in the U.K., along with a fake trap street on a published map to unleash plagiarists. Then there's the license disagreement between the Ordnance Survey and Google regarding London 3D data integration into Google Earth. There's an entry about Google paying independent contractors to update local business info. In this press release, you'll learn about an emergency messenger and personal tracker which allows users to summon help from virtually anywhere on the planet. Then there's a new NASA UAV which will map forest fires and pipe the results to Google Earth, Slashdot also runs a story on UAV (unmanned aerial vehicules) and national security. Here's the first official Vietnam webmapping tool. Here's an interesting analysis on the human sensor web and the crowdsourcing phenomena. A long post on map mashups and webmapping, after the last Mashup Camp meeting. And finally, a short post on Russia's GLONASS GPS system gaining momentum and India's involvement.

The RFID weblog reports it seems there's a possibility of India to have mandatory RFID for all new produced cars: "The ministry of heavy industries is considering a proposal to make it mandatory to fit RFID-enabled devices in the cars manufactured in India. It will be the responsibility of the car manufacturers to ensure that all new cars have these radio-frequency identification tags. It is believed that RFID tags would help in traffic management as traffic violations by motorists could be tracked and all violations identified. Also, motorists would get charged automatically as soon as they enter a toll area." Additionally, Very Spatial links to the intended monitoring of crops in India on a weekly basis: "This will be a very innovative method of assessing crop composition, crop productivity and crop health on a weekly basis. It is possible to have almost complete data at the village level. The method has been tested and validated on a pilot basis."

All Points Blog links to an article named "Opportunities and Challenges in Indian GIS Segment". From the article: "Having said that, there are several major challenges that the industry still faces: 1. GIS and remote sensing application software require high end computers with high end graphics cards etc, which at the moment are comparatively expensive in India. But this problem will cease to persist gradually as prices of hardware keep going down. 2. GIS awareness and education levels are still low in India. It has yet to proliferate fully in the formal technical education space (graduate degree programs, diploma's, etc), even though many universities and colleges have started teaching GIS in PG programs. 3. The last but the biggest constraint is the easy availability of spatial data. In India, most of the organizations that have adopted GIS are still spending a lot of money and time on building data. One of the reasons attributable to this is the disparity between the various systems from which the data has to move from one form to another before the final desired output is available. The second reason is very tight government control on spatial data acquisition and high cost of satellite and aerial data." I also included below a whole bunch of India-related geospatial news.

From the Spacemart web site : India's "ISRO will launch Carto-2A satellite which has Cartography applications including remote sensing, ground water development and a resolution of one meter, by end of January 2008 or first week of February." Click here for details of the article.